I rented a car, and within hours my driver's license was for sale

arstechnica.com

44 points·chha··7 comments

Recent and related:

FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49529621 - Sept 2026 (273 comments)

This kind of inept security should be punished at a level that makes it cheaper to do it right than to pay a small percentage of their profits to continue with their assault on citizens' private info.

Until holding and losing PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is treated and punished like holding and losing radioactive waste, this will not stop.

The penalties for losing PII should be sufficiently high that even the most junior programmer should recognize the probably and immediately blanch whenever asked to write code about it.

I read an article, and within seconds my personal data was shared with 229 “partners”.

The problem is that your data is saved by default and almost never deleted. The rental desk needs to only verify the license — nothing in that transaction requires keeping a scan forever. But storage costs nothing and your data is stored forever to hacker's delight. Unfortunately you can't prevent your data leakage, you can only punish them legally

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49529621

Not quite a dupe. That's the original Krebs one.

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