I’ve seen stories of client information left completely unsecured, unprotected and easily accessible after the closing of a doctor’s office, a car dealership, a real estate agency and a fitness center.
In some cases the customer files were dumped into open trash bins, in others the files were simply left in abandoned offices or in boxes at the curb.
Now, with last week’s failure of Clear, the program that assured travelers’ hasty passage through airport security, the extensive information of 260,000 former customers is at risk. To participate in the program, travelers provided their names, addresses, Social Security numbers, birth dates, digital eye scans, fingerprints and digital photographs.
A representative for Clear and Verified Identity Pass Inc.—the company that ran the program—said customers’ information was wiped from computers at their airport kiosks.
The Transportation Safety Administration, TSA, is still holding the customer information it collected during the pilot program. Given the TSA’s track record, that’s not a comforting thought.
In 2007, the agency lost an external hard drive containing the personal and financial information of 100,000 employees. And, in 2006, the personal information of thousands of Americans mistakenly added to airline watch lists was posted on an unsecured website in 2006.
Last year, in a kettle-pot scenario, the TSA forced Clear to temporarily stop operations when a laptop containing 33,000 customers’ pre-enrollment records was lost at San Francisco International Airport.
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Tags: Clear, LifeLock promotion code, Transportation Safety Administration, TSA, Verified Identity Pass
