Will You Go For A Real Time Theft Protection Feature For Your Credit Card?
Credit Card | November 24, 2009 at 1:39 amSometime ago the credit monitoring service was formed to track faulty crediting practices and now there is a real time theft monitoring that pledges to give theft protection to your credit cards but at the same time it works by accessing all your very private crediting information. So will you like to allow such access to your personal zone for getting extra security? The theft protection feature, which many credit card companies are pushing, involves real-time access to your very vital information.
The Theft protection is ensured by tracking the PII (Personally Identifiable Information) of a credit card holder. The credit card companies work with a third party database in tracking any activity that takes place involving a particular account number, social security number, date of birth and address. This may also involve accessing websites that actually illegally leak such information to fraudulent websites involved in thieving identities. The PII services, which come at a cost of $9.95-$29.95 per month, claim to detect an identity theft much before it actually happens. Credit monitoring services are seen to detect such fraudulence after it occurs. This has brought in a lot of criticism from the users of the products as such services that work after the theft has already occurred is hardly of any use to them.
The PII service is a welcome change to those people who are not satisfied by the old credit security monitoring systems. 
The credit card companies, it seems, are trying their best to keep their profits flowing in and hence they are coming up with new ways to retain their old customers and attract new ones. See what Avivah Litan, VP and Security Analyst, technology research firm Gartner, has to say. “These companies are struggling to keep their revenue up and to keep their customers because consumers realize credit-report monitoring is not all that effective.”
But on the flip side, in order to buy yourself security, you have to compromise with the privacy of your personal information as it becomes accessible to any service provider that promises to track the security of your identity. Your information is easily available on online customer databases and it can be viewed by any service provider promising to provide protection from identity theft. So, there are reasons for you to feel insecure about the very service that claims to provide you security.
Big credit bureaus like Equifax and Experian and Bank of America are already offering PII services. The PII monitoring services are being made available to consumers so that they can track fraudulency themselves. Fraud alert activates are also being diverted to consumers as many feel that the security checks can be dome by the consumers themselves.
The issue of concern here is that are you ready to compromise with the privacy of your vital information for getting any attempts at identity thefts being tracked down? With the effectiveness to be proven yet, I don’t think I’ll vouch for this one.
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