The Consumers Measures Committee, a committee comprised of federal, provincial, and territorial consumer protection representatives, has launched a public consultation on identity theft. The background paper identifies several potential legislative solutions including a requirement for organizations to notify consumers affected by a security breach; the placement of a fraud alert on a consumer’s credit file; the ability for consumers to put a freeze on the sharing of their credit reports without prior notice; and a requirement for credit bureaus to take reasonable steps to authenticate persons accessing credit reports. Comments on the paper are due by September 15, 2005.
Canadian Consultation Launched on Identity Theft
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Average Canadian Citizen
Canadians have more to fear from Equifax, TransUnion, insurance companies, credit-card companies and banks when it comes to the release or access of personal information to criminals. We hear about being careful about shredding personal documents, careful about ATM and debit-card use, about spam and phishing, but that’s all a cover designed to divert attention to the major way that personal information falls into the hands of criminals – which is through the negligence of institutions that handle the information.
You know there’s something wrong when credit-card companies send pre-approved application forms to everyone and anyone’s name they can find (even to work or employer’s addresses).
Our politicians sit on their hands and hope the issue will stay in the background while these organizations do internal dammage control (and suffer NO consequences) when incidents happen.
We deserve better laws and total transparency about what information these institutions have on us, why they have it, what they do with it, who they share it with, and how we can legally force them to permenantly remove selected information (or entire records) from their systems.