Utica College, Lexis-Nexis and the FBI and US Secret Service have teamed up to form a center for identity theft research. It is dubbed as Center for Identity Management and Information Protection. There are other founding members such as Carnegie Mellon University, Indiana University, Syracuse University and IBM.
The center is said to focus on the following:
- causes, detection and prevention of identity theft
- criminal threats
- legislation and policy making
- improvement of authentication systems
- uses of technology in the prevention of identity theft
Projects that the CIMIP would be working on:
The CIMIP will be working with the Bureau of Justice Assistance in examining criminal groups and their methods in perpetrating identity theft. Also, there will a continuing series of conferences and papers from ECI/LexisNexis. This could be seen as a part of their desire to share their research results to the key decision makers in the academe, the government and the businesses (maybe this is going to benefit a lot of those in the pre-need sector).
Identity theft is becoming a prevalent crime. There are different ways for people to commit this kind of crime and sometimes no matter how secure we think our personal information is, it might still be compromised. Technology in this matter is both a blessing and curse as it is a tool which some people abuse. It is good that different sectors of the society have grouped together to research more about it and help us solve the dilemmas caused by it. Their work is very important all the more now that many of us make online transactions, hence the need to safeguard our identities. Maybe it just takes one click on your computer and you put yourself in that position of vulnerability.