Posts Tagged ‘Keywords: personal information’

Not Providing Education Is *THE* Dumbest Idea for Information Security and Privacy Efforts

Monday, August 6th, 2012

Every year or so, an otherwise smart information security professional publishes some really bad information security advice about how awareness and training is a waste of time and money. The latest proclamation at CSO Online has generated a small bit of a firestorm since it was published. 

As time goes on, and more and more information security incidents and privacy breaches occur, and more information is put into the hands, and care, of more and more end-users who have no background in information security or privacy, such statements are simply bad, bad, bad advice. Making such statements also makes it harder for information security and privacy pros to do their job as effectively as possible when business leaders believe such hogwash and then wind up cut funding for information security and privacy education as a result.  I’ve been in the information security and privacy compliance profession for a very long time, have built such programs and assisted many organizations in building theirs, and I could fill a book with examples of how training and awareness activities have improved their information security and privacy efforts and outcomes.  Others in this profession with hands one responsibilities for the full lifecycle of information protection could also write their own books with such examples.

I wrote a blog post about this topic in 2009, and now is a good time to write another and point out that there is greater need than ever before for organizations, of all sizes, to make the comparatively small investment in information security and privacy education for their workers.

5 flawed arguments against information security and privacy education (more…)

Is Frictionless Sharing Like Digital Privacy Cancer?

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

I was recently speaking with a friend on the phone, and she said, “I just had the most embarrassing thing happen!  I had one of my Facebook friends send me a text teasing me about reading a rather sleazy article on TMZ. I did not know what she was talking about! So, I went to my Facebook page, and sure enough, down the timeline there was an article I had only briefly gone to the previous day after clicking a headline about moms on Google news and landed on a page; I quickly got off of when I saw it. I was so embarrassed to see that my brief visit to the page had been posted on my Facebook page! I don’t even go to TMZ on purpose, why is Facebook suddenly tattling on me when it accidentally went there?” (more…)

6 Good Reasons to De-Identify Data

Friday, March 30th, 2012

De-identification is a great privacy tool for all types of businesses, of all sizes.  If you have personal data that you want to use for research, marketing, testing applications, statistical trending or some other legitimate purpose, but you don’t need to know the specific individuals involved in order to meet your goals, then you should consider de-identifying the personal data.  Even though it sounds complicated there are many good methods you can use to accomplish de-identification.  And the great thing is, (more…)