The Ameritrade in the title of this little complaint (the thanks is cheap irony, of which there is a lot more below) is a brokerage firm with which I have an account. I just received a very nice letter from them.

Click to read letter.

Note what they don't say. They don't say not to worry because, since they're not incompetent idiots, your social security number and other sensitive information was only stored in encrypted form. They don't say that they've adopted secure computing practices that will prevent unauthorized code from running on their machines ever again, instead of just using Windows. (Of course they use Windows; who else runs anti-virus software and thinks that it is protecting them?) They assure me that if stuff vanishes from my account with them that they'll give it back (presumably if I can prove that I didn't remove said stuff myself), but not that they will compensate me for time and money spent dealing with the consequences of an instance of identity theft that follows from their negligence. They say that they have no evidence to establish (what a phrase) that my social security number was stolen, not that they have any idea whether it was or not. At least they don't waste any time with small-talk, getting right down to business with the useful sentence, Let me tell you why I am sending this letter.

What rankles worst of all is that all I have had in this account for several years is a $45 cash balance, left over from selling off my stock, that I have been to lazy to ask them to send to me. The lesson here is to remember that our friends at the banks and brokerages are going to continue to be careless with our personal information, so one way to reduce the chances of identity theft is to close accounts that we do not need and ask that our information be purged from databases.