Will ID Theft Be the Christmas Grinch?

Computerworld - You can hardly read a newspaper these days that doesn't warn about legions of thieves poised to steal your identity as you fill your online shopping carts with Christmas gifts. The notion that ID theft is the fastest-growing crime in America is now repeated in story after story as if it were gospel. But no one is asking the obvious question: Is this really true? Or is ID theft the biggest urban legend of the Information Age? A closer look suggests that a real problem has been hyped into mythical proportions, causing undue fear of online transactions.
2003 was the banner year for identity theft. In July, Gartner Inc. and the Privacy and American Business organization published the results of separate surveys showing an 80% increase in ID theft among U.S. consumers (see story). In September, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported that ID-theft complaints to the government were up 73% since last year and that 1 in 10 Americans has been a victim in the past five years (see story). The FBI and the Computer Security Institute said ID theft has hit 13% of their survey takers in the past year alone.
The same story is being told around the world. ID theft is reportedly up 60% this year in Canada, and it's up anywhere from 33% to 165% in the U.K. Similar trends are being reported across the rest of Europe, Australia and Southeast Asia.
At these rates, everyone in the Western world will have lost his identity in the next five years. So why don't I buy this spin?
The main reason is that the definition of what we mean by identity theft seems to be growing about 80% per year. It used to be that ID theft was truly that -- someone completely assuming the identity of another person. The perpetrator typically stole someone's mail, used the information there to take over the person's accounts and drained them in short order. It's a horrifying scenario where the victims can hardly function any longer in society.

	Cline manages data privacy at Carlson Companies Inc., a Minneapolis-based group of businesses in the travel, hospitality and marketing industries. Contact him at privacy@computerworld.com. See more Jay Cline columns.