With the holiday season upon us and the election season behind us, the average consumer may have their attention diverted away from personal privacy issues.

President-elect Barack Obama and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin were concentrating on the election, while high tech thieves smelled an opportunity to violate the candidates’ privacy with reckless abandon. These fraudsters were phone company insiders and random email hackers, not mobsters from an Eastern European crime family.

Here is an excerpt from a story posted on fiercewireless.com:

“Verizon Wireless has fired the employees who accessed President-elect Barack Obama’s personal cell phone account without authorization.

A report on CNN.com quoted an unnamed Verizon source, who would not disclose how many people were fired but said, “we now consider this matter closed.” Apparently the employees were involved in customer service and were not authorized to look at an account unless a customer requested it.

The source also said that records of no other well-known customers had been breached. The phone that was accessed was a flip phone that had been inactive for months, and was not a Blackberry or other smartphone from which email could have been sent or data services could have been accessed.”

In Palin’s case, a 20-year-old student at the University of Tennessee has been indicted for breaking into one of Palin’s accounts and posting the information on a public website.

Here’s the point. We are all vulnerable to attack even if we are careful to do everything right in the privacy arena. Recovering from the emotional roller-coaster and sense of violation after being victimized can be both traumatic and lengthy. In extreme cases, you could even be facing a run-in with the law.

Prepare to remain steadfast this holiday season. If you are a member of AAA, you can unwrap an early Christmas present from them just by visiting their website and reading about their “free”, yes FREE credit monitoring and alerts for members only.

As major banks, insurance companies and investment firms fall victim to the current tsunami of financial storms, your privacy may suffer. When firms change hands, downsize their payrolls and transfer massive amounts of data, proprietary information is left exposed and privacy erodes.

At the end of September, the Dow Jones Industrial Average took the single biggest dive in history, dipping 777 points. In the wake of the impending reorganization of American business, your credit card balances, your mortgage, your savings accounts and your credit history will probably be reshuffled and reinserted into the database of the account’s new overseer.

After days of marathon negotiations, the bailout measure initially went down to defeat in the Congress by a vote of 228 to 205. After the Senate and the House gave final approval for a modified version of the $700 billion rescue plan, President Bush signed it into law on October 3rd, 2008.

Although the free markets globally are facing their toughest challenge ever, those markets do work. The problem is that they are controlled by human beings who are subject to behavior that is sometimes irrational, emotional and irresponsible.

Because of the irresponsible and sometimes deliberate misdeeds of the guardians of the financial gate, it is still your responsibility to to guard your personal information the best way you know how.

If you do not have a personal identity theft risk prevention, detection and mitigation plan in place, what are you waiting for? Visit the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse for great tips on how to protect yourself.