How you can protect your identity on your own

This article came to the fore (again) right after the Target debacle during the holidays. Still pertinent today:

After trending downward for four years, identity theft is on the rise again. Last year more than 11 million consumers were hit by the crime. That's a record, according to Javelin Strategy and Research, a California company that has surveyed 5,000 adults on the subject every year since 2003. The jump is partly a result of the recession, Javelin says, when fraud tends to spike.

But you don't need to sign up for expensive services offered by credit-reporting bureaus and other companies to keep your identity safe. Most of their products are unnecessary or ineffective, or they duplicate things you can do yourself—free. Our own assessment of some two dozen identity-theft protection products crowding the market found dubious value. Here's how to protect yourself.

How you can protect your identity on your own

Providing your driver's license could put you at risk of identity theft - Yahoo Finance

I’ve since discovered that scanning or swiping driver’s licenses or other types of identification and storing the data is becoming commonplace among stores and other businesses, schools, government buildings, and more. “It’s a terrible, terrible practice," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "To begin with, it’s easily a contributor to identity theft, and it’s unnecessary.” The Washington State Department of Licensing’s website actually encourages the use of driver's licenses to collect data, providing details on how anyone can do so using common barcode readers that can be had for less than $30.

At the New York City apartment building, I explained that I saw no need for the building to record my personal information despite the security guard’s assurance that no one looks at it.

If no one looks at it, then why collect it? How do I know that this data isn’t being sold to marketers or scammers or in some other way disseminated to the world? Where’s the privacy statement that tells me how this information is being used and how long it will be retained? What about the potential for this information to be used to stalk people, the very concern that state and federal lawmakers had when they enacted laws restricting the release of motor vehicle records by the states?

Providing your driver's license could put you at risk of identity theft - Yahoo Finance