Thursday, June 12, 2008

Schneier on LifeLock

Bruce Schneier spoke out today concerning the personal data security firm LifeLock. LifeLock is the firm that offers to guard you against identity theft and uses the founder's Social Security Number on its ads to show how certain the firm is that they can protect you. I have been somewhat doubting of their claims. I am not convinced that what they offer is needed or economical. It seems more than anything that they are preying on nervous or fearful people.
On a slightly different note, although I generally agree with Bruce on many topics, I question one of the conclusions he had in this article. He felt that one of the best ways to improve identity security was require everyone to get the same protection offered by getting a credit alert placed on individual accounts. Namely, he feels that if the credit companies had to verify credit requests and identities of persons requesting accounts. I feel like much of the security offered by these steps works more b/c there are those that do not have them in place. If everyone had these precautions in place then the protection would be somewhat negated b/c each target would be equal in difficulty rather than some being "low hanging fruit".
I don't feel like I explained that very well. Can't seem to think very well.

No comments: