Original WSJ Article http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125537784669480983.html

-=-=-=-=-=-==-=- My Response -=-=-=–

Hi Julia,
You know, I am a security professional, and it saddens me when others write stories like this. It’s almost like saying that murder isn’t really a problem cause it only happens to a few people. Bruce is an idiot if he’s going to sit there and say that he’s got no protection for identity theft. I myself have been doing information security work for years and I have dealt with cases of identity theft that have directly affected me and one of my own past businesses.

I just founded a new social network BloopBleep.com and the main reason I’ll probably looking to outsource payment processing is that I don’t want any responsibility (or expense) that goes along with the fraud detection and prevention technologies that are needed to ensure transactions. Payment fraud is very common with credit cards and costs businesses enormous money and it’s not “just the cost of doing business” as you have surmised. Seriously, please don’t do us security folks favors by downplaying real problems like these, we have a tough enough time getting the budgets to deal with the problems we face as it is and don’t need people sitting around making data theft and security a joke in the public.