ChoicePoint said Friday that it had settled with 44 states over its loss of data on 145,000 consumers. The company is also to pay about $500,000 in fines. As part of the agreement, ChoicePoint will put in place better security to protect consumer data. The company is said to have data on just about every American consumer, and the states had argued that lax security allowed criminals to break into the company's systems.

In February of last year, the company disclosed data had been compromised in what was then called the largest case of identity theft in history. The incident spurred a federal investigation that resulted with ChoicePoint settling with the Federal Trade Commission in January 2006, and paying $15 million USD in fines.