March 5, 2005 08:10 PM
ChoicePoint Will Stop Selling Some Consumer Information
Excerpt: Data collector ChoicePoint (CPS) said Friday that it will stop selling personal information about consumers to small businesses.
Data collector ChoicePoint (CPS) said Friday that it will stop selling personal information about consumers to small businesses.
The company also said the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating stock sales by its top two executives.
The dual announcements were made in a news statement and a regulatory filing.
The decision to stop selling data to small businesses was made because that was the segment of the company criminals tapped to gain access to ChoicePoint's database.
Last month, ChoicePoint said it was notifying about 145,000 Americans that their Social Security numbers and other personal information may have been viewed by criminals posing as legitimate ChoicePoint customers. ChoicePoint learned of the breach in October, but delayed disclosing it because it said California authorities had asked it to keep quiet to protect the fraud investigation. A similar breach involving 7,000 to 10,000 ChoicePoint records occurred in 2002.
ChoicePoint said it will stop selling information products that contain sensitive consumer data, including Social Security numbers, to small business customers, except in limited cases where the products support federal, state or local government purposes.
It wasn't immediately clear how many customers the decision affects. ChoicePoint said Feb. 21 when it decided to rescreen 17,000 small business customers that the action affected 5% of its annual revenue of $900 million.
In Friday's regulatory filing, it said because it will no longer sell information to small businesses, it expects a decline in core revenue this year of $15 million to $20 million.
The SEC probe involves the fact that chief executive Derek Smith and president Douglas Curling made a combined $16.6 million in profit from selling company shares in the months after the company learned of fraud involving its massive database — before the breach was made public.
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