Identity Theft

In the US, identity theft appears to be a fact of life. A survey by the Federal Trade Commission showed that almost 5% of Americans were victims of identity theft in the twelve months to April 2003. The Internet facilitates this theft by providing a way to find out a lot about people without them knowing, and by allowing the unscrupulous to pose online as people they are not.

Mechanism

In the US, citizens are used to providing their social security numbers to companies and government agencies as a condition of doing business. Social security numbers are used as a de facto identifier by government agencies and businesses. Lists of citizens' names, addresses and other identifying information are routinely made available on the web, e.g. by state driver licensing authorities. There is a very high incidence of abuse of this information to access victims' funds, incriminate them, or cause other harm to their reputation or well-being.

According to a US survey run by Brightmail, [Now part of Symantec ] an email filtering company, identity theft takes an average of 600 hours of each victim's time to sort out. In the UK, the Home Office estimates that identity theft costs Britons £1.3 billion annually and is growing at 165% per annum. This is mostly plastic card related fraud and not specific to the Internet, but the Internet assists the process by making it easier to obtain the information necessary to steal someone's identity.

In New Zealand, by contrast, incidences of identity theft are rare, possibly because the Privacy Act has given people an expectation that they do not and should not provide unrelated information to companies. The same Act also obliges companies to protect personal information and not to abuse it. However, an experiment by a newspaper [ Taking Names, ComputerWorld New Zealand, 1 March 2004. ] showed that it was possible in New Zealand to get a driver's licence in another's name, even that of a celebrity. The LTSA has since revised its procedures.

Comment

Not currently a major issue in New Zealand, but one which should be monitored.