'Providing personal information and sensitive data is a necessary evil'

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: Sivarama Krishnan, executive director, Business Solutions, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, spoke with Abhay Rao of The Financial Express about identity theft in Indian and why is it a threat we should watch out for. Excerpts

How does identity theft in India occur? Is it something we should be worried about?

In India, people are very careless when it comes to privacy and personal information. We give out our address and phone numbers to shops, restraints etc, which is unnecessary and careless on our part. Identity theft can occur in multiple forms. One of the main areas of concern and places via which identity theft occurs is, through service providers who have our personal information.

In credit cards and banks, if someone hacks the database and steals personal and sensitive data put up, they are at a major risk. While this is a large worry in most countries, in India this is the smallest thread to be worried out, mainly due to the ease with which we part with information in any case. The recent Kingfisher Airline fiasco or people buying mobile connections with false credit cards and incorrect details are a clear example of the lack of awareness and security in these areas. Here the state of mind is not that of guarding your personal details and information. Identity thefts have never really come into the limelight before, as though there are a large number of such cases that occur, very few are ever reported. In India, the opportunities to misuse data and garner other identities is very large, and hence this is something that we should be aware of and worried about.

Why is there such poor reporting of identity theft cases?

Under which laws can you report an identity theft? There is no recourse for people here but to let such things go or maybe complain to the involved organisation, like banks or credit card providers at the most. The law in India does not see most of these cases as identity theft to begin with. A simple thing like acquiring credit cards is also overlooked as an identity theft. These cases are not classified or sensitised as an issue of identity theft. We treat these as frauds and do not go back to the root cause of the fraud, and say this is an identity theft to begin with.