Yet another large scale customer data theft in the U.S.

After the cases of ChoicePoint, Seisint and Bank of America, another large scale theft of customer data has surfaced in the United States.

As German IT news service heise reports, the Ohio-based chain Retail Ventures Inc. acknowledged yesterday that customer data had been stolen from its subsidiary DSW Shoe Warehouse. The data include transaction information involving 1.4 million credit cards (used in 108 DSW stores during the period November 2004 to February 2005) and 96.000 checks.

With this accumulation of cases of serious data theft, this has become a significant political issue, and (as noted in the blog entries referenced above) a couple of politicians have promised action to prevent such occurrences in the future. Like in the case of DNA testing and Germany, a “policy window” may open for an attempt at regulation in this area in the United States over the next couple of months...