Who do you trust with your personal information?
A terrifying tale from Steve Boggan on how he picked up a discarded boarding pass stub and found reams of personal information about its former owner, one Mark Broer. The heart of the problem is that the more of your personal information that moves around, the more opportunities there are for others to steal it.
We logged on to the BA website, bought a ticket in Broer’s name and then, using the frequent flyer number on his boarding pass stub, without typing in a password, were given full access to all his personal details – including his passport number, the date it expired, his nationality (he is Dutch, living in the UK) and his date of birth. The system even allowed us to change the information.
Using this information and surfing publicly available databases, we were able – within 15 minutes – to find out where Broer lived, who lived there with him, where he worked, which universities he had attended and even how much his house was worth when he bought it two years ago.
Why is this kind of thing possible? Security expert Adam Laurie was consulted:
“This is terrible,” he said. “It just shows what happens when governments begin demanding more and more of our personal information and then entrust it to companies simply not geared up for collecting or securing it as it gets shared around more and more people. It doesn’t enhance our security; it undermines it.”
But if you can’t trust companies like BA, who can you trust? Not even the government, since the Home Office can’t even follow its own basic procedures, as foreign prisoners are lost before they are due to be deported.
It’s ironic that systems that aim to enhance security by gathering personal information actually end up being a threat to it. One of the most powerful arguments I can think of against ID cards.
