Introduction

The business of securing our private data is becoming more important and more relevant each day. The benefits of electronic communication come with proportionate risks. Critical business systems can be and are compromised regularly, and are used for illegal purposes. There are many instances of this: Seisint (Lexis-Nexis research), Choicepoint, Bank of America, PayMaxx, DSW Shoe Warehouses, Ameriprise, and T-Mobile are all recent examples.

• Seisint (Lexis-Nexis research) was hacked, potentially compromising names, addresses, and social security and driver s license information relating to 310,000 people.

• Choicepoint, one of the nation s largest information aggregators, allowed criminals to buy the private identity and credit information of more than 150,000 customer accounts. Besides the harm done to Choicepoint s reputation, in late January, 2006, Choicepoint was fined $15 million by the FTC for this breach. This figure does not include the millions of dollars spent by Choicepoint on the cleanup of this debacle. This settlement makes it clear that the FTC is increasingly willing to escalate security-related enforcement actions.

  Warning

  Victims of personal data security breaches are showing their displeasure by terminating relationships with the companies that maintained their data, according to a new national survey sponsored by global law firm White & Case. The independent survey of nearly 10,000 adults, conducted by the respected privacy research organization Ponemon Institute, reveals that nearly 20 percent of respondents say they have terminated a relationship with a company after being notified of a security breach. Companies lose customers when a breach occurs. Of the people we...