Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Ever heard of the airport security program called “CLEAR“? Clear’s customers give out personal identifying information to Clear to help expedite the security check process at airports.

CBS5 news in SanFrancisco reported a laptop containing some information of 33,000 applicants to the CLEAR program was likely stolen for more than a week and then returned. The laptop contained applicants’ birth dates and in some cases, driver’s license, passport or green card numbers. It did not contain Social Security numbers, credit card numbers or fingerprint or iris images used to verify identities at the checkpoints, the company said.

Clear was forced to shutdown enrollment of new members (but not their operating service) by the TSA until Clear implemented encryption on all it’s computers.

Encryption like this is particularly important on mobile devices where physical security is much more of a problem. Several software products now exist to make it much easier to encrypt all the data on your laptop computer. Jed Salazar, a technician at Envysion recommends Bit locker for Windows Vista, TrueCrypt for Windows XP and File Vault for Apple OS-X. Thanks for the links Jed.

There’s not much out there for mobile phones that I know of. If you access email on your mobile phone, you owe it to yourself to at least configure a password or PIN to make it harder for the casual thief from plundering any private data you might keep on your phone.

In the US it might still be a few years before one can make payments using our phone like a credit card.  But when we do you’ll definitely want some protection.