Securing Personal Information to Prevent Theft Essay

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Identity theft is a kind of theft that involves someone stealing the identity of someone else by assuming that person's identity (Lai, Li, & Hsieh, 2012). This is usually a method of gaining access to the person's resources like credit cards and other things in the person's name. This is considered a white-collar crime and it has gained popularity amongst criminals. According to statistics, each year hundreds of thousands of people have their identities stolen. The thieves will use the person's personal information like bank account numbers, credit card numbers, social security numbers, and insurance information to purchase goods fraudulently. The Federal Trade Commission has reported that over 7 million people were victims of identity theft in the past year. This is quite a huge number, and it indicates identity theft is a growing in the United States. When someone manages to use another person's personal information to obtain credit, or make huge purchases, he or she will definitely use the same information repeatedly as a reference to other victims. The technological advances taking shape within the society have created a loophole that the thieves can use to steal and use the victim's personal information. There are different ways that a thief can employ to retrieve personal information. The most common method employed by the thieves is phishing. Using this method, the thieves would manage to trick the potential victim to insert their personal information into a fake website. Once they have the information they would proceed to use the information fraudulently mainly to acquire credit or make online purchases.

Ethical issues

When a person steals another person's information and uses the information for fraudulent purposes, they are violating the person's basic liberties. Since a majority of the crime takes place online, it is quite difficult for the authorities to determine the identity of the person making the transaction. The victims of identity theft do not realize they have been robbed until it is too late. Computers and technology have made it easy for people to transact and interact online, but this has also brought about security issues that the thieves have managed to abuse (Holt & Turner, 2012).

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The right to privacy is violated when identity theft occurs. With the information stolen, the thief is able to gain access to the victim's personal information like bank records, and financial information. The methods used by the thieves to gain access to this information violates the victim's privacy because they use malicious spyware or viruses to take the information from the victim's computer. Gaining access to a person's information without their consent results in the invasion of privacy. The thieves would make use of illegal methodologies in order to gain access to this information. The methodologies would violate the person's right to privacy and security. The information gathered or obtained by the thief should not in any be used or kept for reference purposes. However, technology has allowed for the storage of vast amounts of information and data. This means that the thieves can keep the information for as long as they need. They would then make use of the personal information as they deem fit.

The victim could be accused of a crime they did not commit. The thieves could use the victim's personal information to commit a crime, and this would result in a wrong conviction. Ethically speaking this is quite wrong and it violates a person's right to justice. The difficulty in proving one's innocence makes it hard to have a fair trial or judgment. The thieves would be taking and using something that is not rightfully theirs, which is wrong and unethical. Stealing of any kind should be discouraged and stealing personal information makes it even worse because the thief….....

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