143 Million of us lost some of our most important personal identity data elements around July 7th, 2017 or so. Of course, no one told us intil the past week. You don’t want to panic the victims theft of the data that you collected on them without their consent by notifying them early enough from when you discovered the breach for them to protect themselves. No that might be bad for “bidness”!!!
This credit reporting system is shady at best. The only real check and balance we have is another company just like the one that is reporting on you. We had a terrible issue with these folks. After we moved back the states, we found that someone had a combination of information about my wife and I to finance some auto insurance. It seemed that they bought a year policy financing it and then closed the account in a month. All of this happened while we were living in Europe. So they never paid the loan for the insurance. The loan company got a judgement against us. The insurance broker was out of business as was the finance company and that debt was sold to some outfit in New Jersey. When I was refinanciing a house, I found out about this judgement. I tracked down the “owner” of the debt, and asked them to send me proof that the debt was mine. All they had the jugement from Tx. They had nothing showing my signature or my wife’s. I had passport data showing that we were not even in the country. But none of that mattered, the broker could not process my loan to closing until this “debt” was removed or resolved by the loan. The “owner” sympathized with me but said if you want to refinance you have to play me. It was clearly a scam. I had the mortgage broker include the debt in the loan and give the check to me to pay the debt. They agreed and my loan closed and that check is still in my drawer. But I digress…
This is about Personal Identity and Privacy. I had no idea that there was so much information being collected about me “out there”. I would guess maybe you didn’t either. So here is what i learned:
According to LifeLock I had personal data, such as Birthday, Court Records, Social Network, Marital Status, Phone Number, Family and Address data on the following sites. For a fee, these sites will provide any one who pays that fee the above information. If you do not wish to provide your information in this mannor you have to “opt out”. Each site had a different opt out process. Some allow online opt outs, some have an email verification requirement still others will only let you opt out if you provide proof of who you are .. by fax or mail. When this proof is required, Life Lock said to black out your face and drivers license number before sending. Some opt out processing is instant, others can take up to 2 weeks.
Here are some of the sites that were selling my personal information.
https://www.beenverified.com/f/optout/search
https://www.peoplefinders.com/manage
http://www.peoplelookup.com/
https://www.instantcheckmate.com/opt-out/
https://www.peoplesmart.com/optout-email/
I processed Opt Outs for each of these providers. There may be more. Life Lock will monitor and let me know if more pop up. But I thought I would let you know. You cannot opt out if you don’t know you were “opted-in” in the first place, now can you?