Identity theft

About: Identity theft is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2284 publications have been published within this topic receiving 31700 citations.

Value Added Privacy Services for Healthcare Data

Abstract: The widespread use of digital data, storage and sharing for data mining has given data snoopers a big opportunity to collect and match records from multiple sources for identity theft and other privacy-invasion activities. While most healthcare organizations do a good job in protecting their data in their databases, very few organizations take enough precautions to protect data that is shared with third party organizations. This data is vulnerable to data hackers, snoopers and rouge employees that want to take advantage of the situation. Only recently has the regulatory environment (like HIPAA) tightened the laws to enforce data and privacy protection. The goal of this project was to explore use of value added software services to counter this invasion of privacy problem when data is shared with an external organization for data mining, statistical analysis or other purposes. Specifically, the goal of this service is to protect data without removing sensitive/non-sensitive attributes. Sophisticated data masking algorithms are used in these services to intelligently perturb and swap data fields making it extremely difficult for data snoopers to reveal personal identity, even after linking records with other data sources. Our software service provides value added data analysis with the masked dataset. Dataset-level properties and statistics remain approximately the same after data masking; however, individual record-level values are changed or perturbed to confuse the data snoopers.

Federation: The case for federated identity

Abstract: More than 80 years ago, a reporter asked the infamous thief Willy Sutton why he robbed banks. Sutton's reply was, ''Because that's where the money is, stupid.'' Today, the money is in information and there's a lot of information out there - vulnerable in databases, exposed in transactions and circulating on the Web - helping to make identity theft the fastest growing crime in the world. Organizations across the globe are quickly learning that one of the best ways to prevent identity theft is through 'federation'.

Thirteen Ways to Steal a Bicycle: Theft Law in the Information Age (Introduction)

Abstract: Theft claims more victims and causes greater economic injury than any other criminal offense. Yet theft law is enigmatic, and fundamental questions about what should count as stealing remain unresolved — especially misappropriations of intellectual property, information, ideas, identities, and virtual property.In Thirteen Ways to Steal a Bicycle, Stuart Green assesses our current legal framework at a time when our economy increasingly commodifies intangibles and when the means of committing theft and fraud grow ever more sophisticated. Was it theft for the editor of a technology blog to buy a prototype iPhone he allegedly knew had been lost by an Apple engineer in a Silicon Valley bar? Was it theft for doctors to use a patient’s tissue without permission in order to harvest a valuable cell line? For an Internet activist to publish tens of thousands of State Department documents on his website?In this full-scale critique, Green reveals that the last major reforms in Anglophone theft law, which took place almost fifty years ago, flattened moral distinctions, so that the same punishments are now assigned to vastly different offenses. Unreflective of community attitudes toward theft, which favor gradations in blameworthiness according to what is stolen and under what circumstances, and uninfluenced by advancements in criminal law theory, theft law cries out for another reformation — and soon.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Consumer Reaction to News on Data Breaches and Identity Theft

Abstract: We use the 2012 South Carolina Department of Revenue data breach to study how data breaches and news coverage about them affect consumers' take-up of fraud protections. In this instance, we find that a remarkably large share of consumers who were directly affected by the breach acquired fraud protection services immediately after the breach. In contrast, the response of consumers who were not directly exposed to the breach, but who were exposed to news about it, was negligible. Even among consumers directly exposed to the data breach, the incremental effect of additional news about the breach was small. We conclude that, in this instance, consumers primarily responded to clear and direct evidence of their own exposure to a breach. In the absence of a clear indication of their direct exposure, consumers did not appear to revise their beliefs about future expected losses associated with data breaches.