Slashdot Mirror
Data Theft and Corporate Irresponsibility?
cjsnell asks: "Today, I received a letter from a student loan provider notifying me that my name and social security number had been stolen along with a contractor's computer. This makes -four- agencies that have lost my personal information, in the last year. Today's letter was the most disappointing yet: the company, Texas Guaranteed, did not offer any credit report monitoring like the previous three had. Their advice? Send a letter to the credit bureaus. Gee, thanks. Clearly, mass identity theft is completely out of hand and there doesn't seem to be any government regulation for handling these situations, nor does there seem to be any punitive action against businesses that lose customers' data. Do we, as consumers, have any recourse against these businesses?"
You shouldn't deal with crappy organizations
There is absolutely no reason, NO FUCKING REASON, why any of this information should ever be on a machine that is accessible from the Internet. Hell internally-speaking this is absolutely no reason for all but a handful of internal employees to have unfettered access to this data. IMHO access to this data should require manual intervention. If you want to run a query against it someone on that isolated network should have to type it in manually. If you want to do something grander with the data you should have to bring the query in on a physical medium like a CD, run your query in the isolated system, and then write the results to another medium. This would give people access to the data that they need and nothing more. I don't know. The whole damned system is jacked up. Stop storing the data and people wouldn't have this problem.