Ethics Newsline®

LONDON
Data broker LexisNexis last week revealed that thieves may have stolen personal data on 310,000 people, upping the number of potential victims tenfold from an earlier estimate and sparking renewed calls for legislated reforms.

LexisNexis, which is owned by London-based Reed Elsevier, last month said that the personal data — Social Security numbers, driver’s license information, and other data — from roughly 32,000 people probably had been compromised.

Last week, the firm raised the figure to 310,000, saying an internal investigation into two years’ worth of transactions at U.S. subsidiary Seisint Inc. had found 59 separate breaches, reported the New York Times.

The announcement prompted calls from the U.S. Senate for a crackdown on the practices of the data brokering industry, which generates $5 billion in annual revenues by selling data to landlords, employers, the government, and other clients.

“When a company like LexisNexis so badly underestimates its own ID theft breaches, it is clear that things are totally out of hand,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) told the Times last week.

Schumer is cosponsoring legislation that would ban the sale of Social Security numbers and ratchet up the regulations governing data brokers like Seisint and ChoicePoint, which recently said the data of as many as 145,000 of its customers may have been poached.