Editor's Focus

At the same time Americans receive assurances of privacy when they visit a doctor or open a new bank account, they are also being hit with new requests to disclose more information—often at the behest of the federal government.

A form that recently arrived from my life insurance agent asked for updated information for record keeping purposes, including the drivers’ licenses numbers of myself and my spouse.

While in most cases I would like to trust my insurance agent and the company he represents, I decided to leave those two lines blank, having absorbed enough good advice in my role as editor of this magazine to be judicious in disclosing too many personal identification "markers" in one place that can leave me open to identity theft.

Several days later I received a call from the agent, who informed me that the Patriot Act requires the information to be kept on file. The provision of the act is related to investigating the potential money laundering activities of terrorist organizations and it asks private companies to collect and store confidential information on the government’s behalf.

Another federal law raising the antennae of privacy advocates is known as the Real ID Act. Just as with aspects of the Patriot Act, the collection of more information (the federal government has assigned the states to do this on its behalf) means there will be more electronic and paper files full of confidential information of individuals.

Certainly, no government agency or insurance company wishes to expose its citizens or customers to identity theft by letting any of this information get into the wrong hands. But merely the existence of yet more aggregations of this information will inevitably lead to more misrouted and missing backup electronic files; more cases of non-shredded documents placed in trash bins; more instances of cash-strapped or devious employees selling the information; or more opportunities for hackers to tap into the databases.

Earlier this year, the state of Ohio helped demonstrate this unintended consequence when it posted the Social Security numbers of hundreds of citizens who had filled out a form for one of the state’s agencies. The state acted quickly to take the information off of its Web site, but the security lapse is an example of an honest mistake that can create an opening for ID thieves.

Whatever one’s opinion about the government’s right to collect personal information, the practice is mushrooming.

This effort, combined with the corporate trend of wanting to know more and more about customers and preserving that data for marketing purposes, clearly shows that the secure storage and destruction industries will have no shortage of future opportunities.