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German Survey Company Loses 41,000 Survey Records

Posted by timothy on from the entschuldigen-bitte dept.

mister_woods writes "It's not just governments that lose private data. Germany's Chaos Computer Club (CCC) reports that market research firm TNS Infratest/Emnid has lost 41,000 private data records of their survey participants. By simply changing the customer ID number in the browser's address bar access could be gained to comprehensive survey results, including names, addresses, dates of birth, email addresses, phone numbers and much more sensitive data. A CCC spokesman described this as 'unprofessional, grossly negligent and above all deeply worrying' and sees this loss as a vindication for its calls for strict regulations for public and private sector data collectors."

3 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Another day, another data leak. by inotocracy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When are these companies going to start getting fined for data leaks? I'd bet this sort of thing would be a lot less common if there was a huge price to pay, other than a useless apology note.

    1. Re:Another day, another data leak. by jlarocco · · Score: 5, Insightful

      When are these companies going to start getting fined for data leaks? I'd bet this sort of thing would be a lot less common if there was a huge price to pay, other than a useless apology note.

      Having the government impose a fine is not the answer. The *only* way companies will ever learn to properly secure consumer data is if consumers drive them out of business when they fuck it up. If consumers can't be bothered with 5 minutes of research to avoid companies with poor privacy practices, there's absolutely no incentive for companies to spend the money to respect privacy. A fine just increases the cost of doing business - meaning you'll pay even more to have them lose your data.

      --
      Maybe not
    2. Re:Another day, another data leak. by Rakishi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well the amount of data leaks would suddenly drop since companies would suddenly overlook it when data goes missing. After all they thought it was an empty hard drive and they'd be just as confused as everyone else when it turned out differently. In other words they'd simply not report them because reporting them would automatically give them a fine. So consumers get screwed in the end because they don't even get alerted when their data is stolen.