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September 10, 2012, 06:23:49 PM |
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Seeing that even very large companies (Sony, Linkedln) and others have break ins, and loss of customer data, it must be assumed that any information and/or data that you send anywhere, could at one point fall in the wrong hands, be it after a IT break in or some rogue employee stealing the information.
To decrease the likelyhood of identity theft, I have often put visible watermarks on copies of my passport that I upload to a company and also blacking out the last numbers in my social security number. This way, even if someone get's their hand on this identification document, it's that much harder to misuse it.
Now, dealing with a legitimate company that's been in business for many years, I have no reason to think that they're going to misuse the information, but depending on how this information is stored within their company, it could be compromized at some point in time.
Looking at the nightmarish stories about people that's been subject to identity theft, I would like to avoid that 100%, or reduce the chance of it happening as much as possible.
So, in the event that my uploaded identification paper ever get's lost, I would like to have some method of knowing where it was compromized, so that I could have evidence in the event there ever was identity theft.
Some companies doesn't allow an uploaded ID scan to be altered, so how could I protect myself in this case ? Obviously I would go after the company if the uploaded ID scan was ever lost, but if I have accounts with several companies, how would I know where the leak is ?
I was thinking, would there be possible to have some kind of 'invisible' watermark on the uploaded documents, which could be spotted (by a program for example) if the document ever were to be lost ? That way I think the evidence would be very clear, in the event there ever was a problem.
Another idea was to make notarized copies of my passport every time I do this, with different dates, and then noting down which copy was sent to which company. However, this would incurr some logistic costs (which would far outweight the cost of identity theft itself admittedly), but would still be a hassle.
So, the easiest way would perhaps be to have some kind of watermarking embedded in the picture, that would remain, even if the ID scan was ever copied by some high res cam taking picture of a screen.
I'm surely going to investigate this online, to see if existing methods for watermarking exists, would also be glad if anyone had input on this.
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