I recently posed the question about when three years of credit monitoring might not be enough. As it turns out, deciding what to offer those affected by a breach may be a bit easier in light of a new offering from Debix called AfterCare™. Although I generally avoid blogging about commercial products, the timing of this one with the query I posed is too good to ignore.
Over on Emergent Chaos, Adam blogs:
In the past, I’ve been opposed to calling impersonation frauds “identity theft.” I’ve wondered why the term impersonation isn’t good enough. As anyone who’s read the ID Theft Resource Center’s ‘ID Theft Aftermath’ reports (2009 report) knows that a lot of the problem with longterm impersonation problems is the psychological impact of disassociation from your good name. It’s not just the financial costs of dealing with mistakes (although those are important), it’s the sense of dread in connecting to today’s society and the reputation infrastructures that have been overlaid onto our lives. It’s the fear of victims that they’re perceived as irrationally fearful, whingers or a burden.
And so I want to quote from a blog post from Debix:
It’s Bo here, CEO of Debix. Today, I’m excited to announce another industry first for Debix – a new feature of our OnCall Credit Monitoring™ product called AfterCare™.
Read more on Emergent Chaos and then on Debix. It strikes me that entities offering that type of service as part of a response to a breach might save themselves some litigation costs down the road by showing that they are recognizing and have prepared for long-term issues such as cases when stolen data are not used within the first year but are used later or when the problem goes far beyond just credit card fraud. If you received a breach notification, wouldn’t you want to know that someone will be available to assist you with identity repair in the future if the breach results in identity harm to you?