Any time you hand over personal information to a company offering goods and services to you, you open the door to identity theft.
Yes, it’s convenient and adds value and ease to our busy lives.
But the downside is, you don’t have the access or capability to discover whether the company holding your information has properly secured it.
Today’s example: The New York Times’ story on how hackers can easily breach loyalty cards, stealing your information – and your rewards values. The story notes loyalty card hacking appears to have doubled from 2017 to 2018.
The story quotes a security risk expert as saying loyalty cards tend to be “the path of least resistance: easy to sign up for, shielded by flimsy passwords and often neglected by users.”
The latter point refers to people signing up for loyalty programs, then drifting away from the retailer, hotel, airline or restaurant and rarely using – or monitoring – their accounts again.
As the security expert noted, that’s a recipe that will draw hackers to honey.