Travelers have long been bombarded with warnings about various ways that thieves can gain access to their personal information.
You can add airline luggage tags to a list that includes boarding passes and hotel key cards.
An internet search reveals a number of recent articles advising that thieves can use luggage tags for the purpose of making false lost luggage claims to airlines.
A brand new article by consumer advocate Clark Howard whetted our interest:
Scam Alert: Never Throw This Away in an Airport
Howard cites a "leaked report from a Delta claims representative" that thieves are staking out airport trash cans to retrieve discarded tags and file bogus claims with airlines.
What immediately struck us as odd was the fact that the airlines themselves, not the passenger, are the victims of these alleged crimes. If the airline-produced tags are allowing thieves to utilize them in this way, why wouldn't the airlines change the tags? We decided to check further.
The author cites as his reference a "leaked report." The same source is referenced by other articles (see here and here for example) for this warning. It turns out to be an anonymous Reddit post made by someone claiming to be a Delta employee.
An AI summary reports the claim as legitimate, with the standard disclaimer that it "may contain inaccuracies."
Checking further, we find a Fodor's article that nails the Reddit post as the source of the rumor, and concludes that the "grain of truth" in the warning might be merely a tiny grain. Why aren't any airlines publicizing this themselves?
Don't get us wrong. On those rare occasions that we check luggage, we remove the tags as soon as possible and tear them into small pieces before throwing them away. We do the same with boarding passes once our flights have been posted in our mileage accounts.
We don't worry too much about hotel key cards. Rumors that the cards contain credit card details and other personal information have been around for more than two decades and are apparently based on one California police officer's honest misunderstanding. Warnings about boarding passes have been published for years and may also be exaggerated.
It's definitely a wise idea not to post photos of your boarding passes, luggage tags, or any personal documents on social media. No kidding!
We're more concerned when traveling about fraud connected to our credit and debit cards. We'll still tear our luggage tags into tiny pieces at some point after we've claimed our bags and checked the contents, just in case. The same goes for boarding passes.
Finally, if you're genuinely worried about privacy in this age of technology, focus your attention on the latest U.S. biometric de facto exit controls, the first in U.S. history, requiring a mug shot to leave the country. George Orwell wouldn't be surprised. As blogger Gary Leff, the post's author, puts it:
I’m an old fashioned civil libertarian, which makes me something of a dinosaur. I realize the ship on this has sailed, but I’ll still mourn the passing of a time when we didn’t need to show our papers – back when those papers weren’t digitized.
We can foresee a day when paper passports and plastic credit cards are no longer required. The world will run on facial recognition. Would that be a great increase in convenience or a great loss of personal privacy? Perhaps some of each. We dinosaurs do tend toward pessimism.
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