As we attempt to protect our identities from theft and abuse, we often find ourselves in situations where we have to trust others and share some of our most private information like pass codes, house keys, photo identification cards, and car keys.

You probably give your keys to the valet parking from time to time, or you may leave you car at the garage for repairs often for days. Although there are risk components of these actions that we can control such as not leaving any private documents or house keys in the car when we drop it off for repairs, other times we just have to knowingly trust others. For example, when we give our IT staff or contractors administrative access to maintain our systems or share our pass codes to allow web designers to make changes to our websites, we are not blindly trusting them but rather out of no other alternatives, we are accepting the risk and trusting others.

Sure we can do certain things to manage the risk a little better like monitoring their activities and changing the pass codes before and after a contract is completed, but there is still that small window of opportunity where others we trusted can cause some damage but, we wouldn't share our privacy if we didn't accept a calculated risk or trust them in the first place, right?

The next questions is how do we trust others and to what extent since we can not fully trust when we enter into a relationship with them? By asking questions, checkering references, researching online, and then using our internal guiding system called intuition or gut feeling to trust initially and start building relationships to trust even more later.

Read an article about valet parking risks or visit our identity theft blog to read recently posted articles.

Until next time, be identity safe,
Henry Bagdasarian
Identity Management Institute

Recent Blog Articles

Customer Role Businesses must acknowledge the customer role as a business partner in the battle against identity fraud and provide the necessary customer awareness and education to reduce their identity theft risk.

Credit Report Freeze A credit report freeze is the most effective identity theft prevention tool which has some limitations, benefits and advantages which we discuss in this article.