The free credit report thing is basically a farce. It only tells you very specific information about your situation at a point in time.

For the criminal, this is the pot of gold.

I don't like to be this positive, but I genuinely think E-Trade is doing something very good here. I think they've been targeted to a degree because they've made it easy for people to open brokerage accounts, but they're not conservative. They really are innovative in security.

In the past, everything was much more traceable. Now you can open 10,000 (bogus) accounts in the time it used to take to open one, all in a faceless Internet.

It's much more convenient than anything else available to consumers,

Consumers are being targeted directly, while their personal data is being attacked on corporate servers. It's a 360-degree threat.

(It's possible) that a manager of a store has no clue they are doing it. The information can be buried in old software.

It's not negligence. It's just kind of being asleep at the wheel when business is running smoothly, and then you get hit.

There will be more security holes. In the end, it increases the risks not decreases them.

This gives customers direct access to information already available to companies.