Your vital information is their commodity

How do you like the idea that so many companies, like Choicepoint, treat your most important information like a commodity?  Creepy, isn't it.    Evan Hendrick's piece in the Washington Post,  When Your Identity is Their Commodity is must-reading for financial services companies.

Maybe you're not one of the 145,000 people whose identities were sold to bogus companies by Choicepoint or the 1.2 million federal employees whose credit data was lost by the Bank of America, but that doesn't mean you're not concerned about identity theft.  Ten million people were affected by some form of identity theft in 2003 according to the Federal Trade Commission. 

Hendrick writes that a Tower Group report in 2001 or 2003 said that the incidence of identity theft was such a small fraction of transactions that most financial service companies could not justify the extra expense of preventing it.

This is shameful and stupid.  Financial service companies are dealing today in a commodity business.  Can't any of them see, that providing privacy proactive policies and services can be a distinct competitive advantage?  People would flock to any  bank that offered them.

Just what are financial services companies doing to insure their customers that their most important and confidential information will not be bought or sold? Not much from what I can see.