Your Info Is Not Safe

Lexis-Nexis, a grand and wonderful information-gathering system that I made much use of during law-school, has been falling asleep on the job.

What's more valuable these days than information? Nothing, and that's why companies like Lexis (Reed-Elsevier) and Westlaw (Thompson West) are pulling in huge numbers every year.

Problem is, they're not protecting what they're gathering. Well, maybe Westlaw is, but Lexis certainly isn't. They recently announced that the personal information compiled or gathered on 310,000 people has been stolen over the last couple of months.

What does this mean to you? Well, Lexis-Nexis is an information clearing-house. From the article:

Seisint [a "unit" of Lexis-Nexis], based in Boca Raton, Florida, uses property records and other public
data to build profiles on millions of U.S. consumers, which it sells to
law-enforcement agencies and financial institutions. (Additional reporting by
Adam Pasick in London)

Scary, isn't it? When you read the linked article, hopefully you didn't skip over the part about "a rash of similar break-ins at other companies handling consumer data."

Check your credit reports every year, people.