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Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

Just about every organization that I've entrusted my PII to -- insurance companies (thanks, Anthem), banks, government agencies (thanks VA, OPM, DoD), etc., has managed to lose control of it. I don't know why I even bother trying to keep my identity secure.

I'm probably buying 3 houses in 3 different states as I write this.

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Same here. I have been made eligible for free credit monitoring services three times in the past year alone.

I think maybe I'll just get really familiar with the FCRA and the FDCPA, so that when someone inevitably uses my stolen PII to commit fraud, I can hit back--and get paid for my inconvenience--when the creditors and reporting agencies fail to do the right thing.

I was the victim of identity theft about 14 years ago from someone employed at my company. My personal situation wasn't too bad, they opened some credit cards. But other employees had their brokerage accounts broken into. In California at least you can "freeze" your credit reports which means you have to pay a small fee and unlock them with a pin code to get credit. I did that many years ago and while it's occasionally a hassle I think it is well worth it to avoid people opening credit in your name.

The best part about the credit monitoring services is that they're inevitably going to get hacked too. Especially Lifelock, which just got fined for having atrocious security practices (reading between the lines a bit, it looked like they were using unhashed passwords on the backend).

There really is no hope.

It seems like the only hope is that they would switch back to a pen and paper system and never digitalize the data... or if they would use an air gap, that would be a good start. But of course you have to make sure that you never say your data around an android phone, an iphone, an amazon device, a smart TV, etc...

Hashing passwords is NOT difficult. It never ceases to amaze me how many online service providers fail to do this.

And I would like to personally thank you for one of those. :)

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