An Internet firm that sold people’s telephone numbers and credit card details has agreed to US Federal Trade Commission demands to halt its business and pay a fine. According to experts at InfoWatch, privacy is a top priority for the US public today, meaning companies have to tread carefully where private data is involved.
A US Internet business that sold private telephone and credit card records has agreed to settle charges made by the Federal trade Commission that it violated US law.
Integrity Security & Investigation Services and its owner Edmund Edmister agreed to pay a fine of $2,700, the total sum earned from the sale of private telephone records and credit card transactions. The settlement also bars the company from obtaining and selling confidential phone and credit account records unless authorized by law or court order.
In May of this year the FTC filed lawsuits against five Internet companies that were selling telephone and other private data acquired through the practice of ‘pretexting’. Pretexting is the attempt to obtain phone or other personal records from companies by pretending to be the targeted customer. Integrity Security & Investigation Services is the first firm to settle with the FTC; charges are still pending against the four remaining companies.
The widespread problem of pretexting hit the headlines recently when it was at the center of the scandal at Hewlett-Packard. The company admitted it used the method to gain access to the phone records of employees, board members and journalists. Senior managers at other US companies, however, supported the methods used by HP to trace the source of leaks from the firm.
“The lawsuits brought by the FTC once again prove that today the public, regulatory bodies and the government are very thorough when it comes to the privacy and security of people’s personal information. Businesses must, first of all, fully comply with all normative acts and, secondly, understand the mood of society and not provoke draconian measures by politicians that would make it impossible to do anything with private data,” says Denis Zenkin, marketing director at InfoWatch.
Source: ComputerWorld
