Sunday, April 13, 2008

Privacy friendly Truston ID Theft prevention/recovery platform wins 2008 Tech Award



After just being named a 2008 Hot Company, Tom Fragala and the Truston team have another award under their belt.

From the Marketwire press release:

Truston®, a provider of award-winning online services for identity theft protection, announced today that Info Security Products Guide, the world’s leading publication on security-related products and technologies, has named myTruston® a winner of the 2008 Tomorrow’s Technology Today Award.

Truston has largely been launched via word of mouth and doesn't offer a lot of gimmicks. What it provides is a DIY (do it yourself) method of protecting yourself and recovering from identity theft.

The press release describes the MyTruston technology:

MyTruston is the only fully online identity theft recovery system. It is hosted web-based software that can help millions of people easily recover from and prevent identity fraud by supporting virtually any type of ID theft. MyTruston walks consumers step-by-step through the entire prevention or recovery process—dramatically reducing the time, financial cost, and emotional impact. And it can easily be embedded into a partner's own website. To read more about this award winning technology, please visit www.infosecurityproductsguide.com/technology.

Tom Fragala, Truston's CEO, is amongst other things an actual identity theft victim, a blogger and spent thousands of hours advocating for identity theft victims before the his technology was launched.

He firmly believes in the basic information security principle that the less places information is stored, the less likely it is to be compromised. This is the reason that MyTruston never asks a person for any of their personal information.

Most identity theft protection services require you give them all your personal details and in some instances, a power of attorney. Given how information is bought and sold and with everything being outsourced to call centers that provide cheap labor, this is something that bears consideration.

Additionally, the prevention and "discovery" process is completely free-of-charge and the service only charges for using the software to recover from identity theft.

There is no long-term commitment to protect yourself.

Tom freely admits that a person can recover from identity theft, if they know how to do it and have the knowledge. One of the reasons there are so many players in the identity theft protection field is that most people find it confusing and difficult to get through all the red tape after becoming a victim.

What Truston provides is a free platform to discover the problem and an interactive means to effectively solve it without having to do a lot of research.

Marketwire press release on Truston's latest award, here.

If you want to test out the free portion (now includes a free trial) of MyTruston, here is a link.

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