What to do with leftover customer data?

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July 1st, 2009 - Posted by Caitlin

Verified Identity Pass was a privately owned company that offered a service called Clear, which was designed to help air travelers get through airport security checks faster by vetting their identities and backgrounds in advance. On June 21, Verified Identity Pass announced that, for financial reasons, it would be ceasing operations. The abrupt closure has raised serious concerns about the customer data collected by the company. Stored information includes fingerprints, iris scans and digital images for roughly 260,000 customers. While this registered travel program was privately owned, it was authorized by the TSA, which required the service to record full legal names, home addresses, dates and places of birth, genders, heights, driver's license numbers, passport details and other information for all customers.

Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, has given the Transportation Security Administration until July 8 to explain how the agency plans to ensure the security of all this data. The TSA is in the process of putting together a response to this question, and in the meantime, claims that Clear is appropriately safeguarding the collected data. Verified Identity Pass assures customers that their information is being stored in conformance with the TSA's security and privacy requirements. But the data has yet to be deleted, leaving open the possibility that it could be sold or passed on to a third party, if the intention is to use it for another registered travel program.

As long as our personal information is out there, beyond our control, it is wise to invest in identity theft protection.