How to safeguard our personal and financial data?

Internet users are frequently required to provide personal data online. If you start up a yahoo or hotmail account, register for an online banking service or buy your groceries online, you will be asked to provide personal information about yourself. Whenever you buy goods or services online, you also have to provide highly sensitive information. We cannot escape the fact that we need to give information to access online services.

The most fundamental guideline for protecting our own personal data is to only disclose personal information whenever it is absolutely required and where organizations or corporations offer clear guidelines to protect data privacy.

We should be extremely careful not to disclose personal information online in situations where there are no privacy protection guidelines (for example, posting personal information in a chat room or newsgroup). Avoid disclosing our own or others’ personal information such as email addresses, home addresses, job and company details in a public forum. Also, take care not to pass on others’ email addresses or details without their permission. Simply forwarding an email with others’ email addresses on it can compromise the data privacy of others and result in privacy intrusions such as unwanted messages or spam.

Consumer and privacy advocates are calling for legislation that authorizes any individual whose data was compromised to place a seven year fraud alert on our credit report. A fraud alert requires creditors to contact the consumer before issuing credit in our names. Currently a seven year alert is available only for consumers who are already identity theft victims. This is like getting a flu shot after we have contracted the flu. A longer than 90 day period for an early fraud alert would help to prevent identity theft.

Besides, we should have the right to place a free security freeze on our credit report. A security freeze would allow us to control the release of confidential data, and would allow us to lift the freeze on a selective basis, for example, when applying for a mortgage. Any individual who receives a notice of an unauthorized release of confidential data should be entitled to a security freeze at no cost. We should be able to establish a security freeze for preventive purposes at no cost.