Perhaps in response to the huge data breach at Heartland Payment Systems that resulted in millions of consumers with compromised data, the State of Massachusetts passed a law stating that merchants are responsible for data breaches – not the people who are victims of the breach. This means that if your personal information is stolen from a business’s records, you are not responsible for the money that you lose as a result of the crime. The business that lost your personal information is responsible if the financial crime against you is directly correlated.
One hopes that with this law in place, businesses will do more to help prevent this crime from happening to their customers or their members via increased data security. According to Joel Ross of Hotel News Now, this could have a serious impact on the hotel industry, which uses guests’ names and credit card numbers in its records. Ross feels that the service industry is particularly vulnerable to identity thieves, possibly due to the sheer volume of people that cycle in and out of a hotel in a year.
Even with businesses being more vigilant about protecting their files to prevent identity theft, this doesn’t mean you will be 100% protected. In fact, Ross himself said that data is not guaranteed safe even if a business has intrusion detection, firewalls or other security measures in place. All it takes is one employee who has access to secure data to bring down the entire business.
Since even laws won’t change this fact, and the Massachusetts law does not apply in any other states – although other states are considering similar legislation – it’s still very important to work to protect yourself. While you will have to give out real credit card information to reserve a hotel room, you can have some extra protection on the back end of your accounts, in the form of an identity theft protection plan.
With this plan in place, even if a data breach happens and the company responsible doesn’t reimburse you, you could be protected, and reimbursed by the plan’s insurance policy. Another thing that can help is if you get notice of the breach before it becomes public thanks to your identity theft protection service letting you know that something in your credit file looks a little fishy. That could save you the inconvenience of worrying about a reimbursement altogether. In fact, you could be the one that alerts the company of the problem, possibly saving dozens or thousands of people from unneeded hardship. Remember, there are about 10 million victims of identity theft each year in this country alone.