Choicepoint Case Analysis

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

Analysis of ChoicePoint Case Study

Group 10

Amar Kohli, BK Sarthak Das, Dhawal Kumar Lachhwani and Divya Krishnan 12/1/2014

Executive Summary ChoicePoint being one of the major players in the personal data industry was reveling in its success by the end of 2004, with revenues of $920 million and a customer base of 100,000. It had used its greatest asset - data, to create value for its clients using relevant products and services. The clients of ChoicePoint were able to drive business growth to new heights harnessing the personal data of millions of citizens in America. But all was not well with ChoicePoint when they were ambushed by privacy advocates and victims of identity theft. This was a result of their business model which focused on maximizing profits and was negligent in protecting its data against people with criminal intent. Identity thieves had got access to sensitive information on more than 163,000 ChoicePoint customers which led to huge monetary loss. While investigating an incident of identity theft, ChoicePoint discovered 50 fake client accounts opened by criminals to extract valuable information about their targets. ChoicePoint was also critiqued heavily for its data inaccuracies and lack of proper procedure to correct data mismatch especially data originating from government entities. After extensive analysis of the case study, we feel that ChoicePoint could have adopted certain strategies to win over public confidence and prevent monetary loss owing to lawsuits. ChoicePoint could have reviewed their clients through onsite visit which would have prevented fake accounts from being created and kept the identity thieves at bay. It was also necessary for ChoicePoint to have an audit mechanism through which they kept track of client data requests so as to ensure that the data was used to legitimate purposes. With respect to the issue of data inaccuracies, ChoicePoint could have obtained the access rights to the source...