Identity Theft Liability and Compensation

If an institution, organization, business or individual reveals any personal information as a result of error, accident, carelessness or inadequate security procedures e.g. failure to shred or otherwise destroy irrecoverably any personal information prior to its entry into the public domain as trash then they are most definitely responsible for the security breach. Instigation of litigation proceedings should commence immediately.

Whenever an institution, organization, business or individual fails to take adequate precautions to protect the personal information, which they hold or have access to or are a party to the disclosure of any personal information that they hold or have access to they are most definitely liable. Litigation should commence immediately.

In situations where an employee or contractor committed an illegal act in revealing personal information the employer still bears part of the responsibility. The onus for the securing of personal information lies with the holder of that information.

Legal Precedence

With legal precedence regarding organizational liability, arising out of the inappropriate or illegal release of personal information established victims of such occurrences of identity theft now have a firm legal basis for seeking compensation.

Trading Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

Organizations of all sizes and persuasions have an obligation in law to help you protect your private data. With that said, one remaining issue still of concern is the practice of selling or trading private information to legitimate inquirers for a profit.

Email address trading between business partners is probably the aspect of this trading or selling of personal information that is uppermost in then minds of most of us. For legitimate instances, we usually accept this.

However, when non related correspondence is involved we do find the results to be annoying, even downright invasive. You may need to supply a company with your email particulars in order to obtain something from them.

To illustrate let us say a digital camera. Receiving future emails pertaining to new aspects directly related to this camera may be acceptable. Receiving emails that are thinly disguised ads for other unrelated products such as Viagra or organ enlargement may not.

Conclusion

As far as your personal information (personally identifiable information) is concerned, you are ultimately responsible for ensuring its security.

Contact all parties, organizations and individuals that you believe to be holding your personal information and request details of their methods, procedures and capacity to comply with current legislation.

You are entitled to not only do this but can go even further by asking for proof of the trustworthiness of their procedures and to view the personal information which they hold about you.