By: Hiroyuki Tanaka
This article is about the results of the”Javelin Strategy & Research’s 2012 Identity Theft Report.”
https://www.javelinstrategy.com/brochure/239
According to the article, in 2012, the victims of identity theft were 12.6 million.
It is genrally alleged that regularly monitoring financial transactions and receiving alerts about irregular transactions is a good way to prevent identity theft. However, if personal information is used to open new accounts, consumers cannot monitor or receive alerts about identity theft. As this article shows, more than half of victims were not only monitoring their accounts, but also using “financial alerts, credit monitoring or identity protection services.” So the traditional way of preventing identity theft is not effectively working.
So what can be done to prevent identity theft? One way to go is leaving it to the consumer’s choices. According to the article, 15% of identity theft victims “decide to change their behaviors and avoid smaller online merchants.” This shows that most of the consumers keep on using the same service even after the identity theft. As there is no clear standard for consumers to choose which service is paying more attention to the identity theft, it is difficult for consumers to change behaviors. It can be said that consumers tend not to change their behaviors if they are satisfied with the quality or price of the service other than the privacy protection. So, leaving it to consumers’ choices does not seem to be a good idea. Another way to go is posing higher liability such as strict liability on service provider and strengthening government regulation including its enforcement. As this will result in the huge increase of costs for service providers, it will be difficult to form a consensus. But, as the victims of identity theft are increasing year by year, it is necessary to find common ground to balance the profits of companies and consumer protection.