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Medical Data on 365,000 Patients Stolen
Anonymous writes "Backup tapes and disks with data on 365,000 patients were stolen out of the car of a worker at a healthcare company in Portland. According to this Computerworld story, the tapes were in his car because he took them home as part of a disaster recovery plan, to protect the information from fire and other on-site disasters. D'oh!"
Everyday in the newspaper you see cars getting broken into. Everyone you know has probably had his car broken into. If you leave anything at all visible, your car *will* get broken into. Even just a couple CDs.
But still... I see laptops in cars all the damn time (even though I have two relatives who've had laptops stolen from cars), and last year in Seattle the police chief had his *gun* stolen from his unmarked car.
No insurance company should ever cover anything stolen from a car under any circumstances. Anyone who has their employer's belongings stolen from a car should be fired. And loss of personal data from a car should be prima facie evidence of negligence; in other words, each of those 100,000 customers should be able to sue the company and recover for the time and money it takes them to reinvent their financial lives, and possibly also for potential damages from misuse of the information.