When I started to get involved in researching and working with credit scoring at a prior employer, a couple of my reasons for doing so were a result of pressure from my inner activist—given the sensitivity of the information, I preferred to trust myself rather than relying on corporate privacy protocols (which were comparatively in their formative stages at the time), and because I had trouble believing that credit was as predictive as claimed and therefore I wanted to prove it for myself.
Well, perhaps there was some justification for that first motivation, beyond simple paranoia. Although I didn’t work for the company mentioned in this Insurance Journal story, this is exactly the sort of thing that gave me nightmares when considering data security in my prior job:
A woman who works for the company that processes Alabama Medicaid claims has been charged with stealing the identities of nearly 500 Alabamians, Attorney General Troy King said.
Kwantrice Thornton, 24, was charged with stealing the information from Electronic Data Systems Inc. as part of a Medicaid and tax fraud scheme that included selling 50 of the identities to other people, King said.
It’s times like this that even though I may rail against corporate IT security paranoia, there is some justification for some of the seemingly silly and draconian rules we get to play by.