I finished Rob Hamadi's Identity Theft: What it is, How to Prevent it, and What to Do if it Happens to You yesterday, and am feeling vaguely freaked out today.
Hamadi assembles dozens of identity-theft cases in short narrative form, like little cautionary tales, and then strings them together with some interconnecting material to show you who commits identity theft, who falls victim to it, how identity thieves work, and what steps are most likely to mitigate the threats. Also, and importantly, he describes which steps won't make an appreciable difference in identity theft — like biometric ID systems — and how companies' imperiousness (demanding you identify yourself at every turn and taking copies of your ID) negligence (throwing those copies out unshredded) and foolishness (demanding easily forged documents like gas bills as proof of ID) make us all more vulnerable.
My take-away from this is that there are some steps that we can individually take to improve our security against identity theft — buy a good shredder for your credit-card receipts, don't recite your account numbers aloud into your mobile phone on a crowded bus, make up something other than your mother's maiden name to use when asked to give it as a security password — that the main identity theft risk needs to be addressed by calling companies and agencies that compromise our identities to account. When the hotel you've checked into takes a photocopy of your driver's license, you can storm out in a huff, but that's not a sustainable way of behaving, especially when they all start doing it.
