There are many new small and mid-size business start-ups who are offering a wide range of online services, mobile apps, and smart devices. There are also many businesses that have been around a long time that see an opportunity and so are expanding into these areas. I’ve spoken with many such businesses, and they often make two common privacy mistakes: Read the rest of this entry »
Privacy Lessons from Snapchat
June 3rd, 2014Lessons from 3 Organizations That Made 3 Privacy Mistakes
May 21st, 2014Even with the number of privacy breaches increasing, and with numbers of privacy sanctions coming from the FTC and other regulatory agencies and courts snowballing for companies doing irresponsible things with personal information, putting growing numbers of individuals at risk of identity fraud as well as physical safety risks, companies are still asking for way too much unnecessary and sensitive personal information purely for their marketing purposes.
And too many online media outlets, often reporting on or promoting these marketing efforts, are perpetuating these very bad privacy practices. Then, so they will not upset their advertisers, they actually are deleting comments that point out how bad those marketing and data collection practices are. I recently just experienced such a situation with Read the rest of this entry »
Dairy Queen Will Trade Your Privacy and Safety for Free Ice-cream Cake!
May 9th, 2014This morning I heard that in honor of Mother’s Day, Dairy Queen would give you a free cake if you would just send them an email with your baby’s birth certificate attached. What!? Did I hear correctly? So, I did a search, and sure enough, there it was; on a list on the ABC News Blog (see screen image below): Read the rest of this entry »
Heartbleed Facts and Fictions
April 25th, 2014Heartbleed has certainly been the security and privacy mistake/incident of April, if not of 2014. There has been a lot written about it, much good and much bad. I’ve gotten dozens of questions about it and provided an explanation in layman’s terms on the Great Day morning news show. Here are the most common questions, and associated answers, that I’ve received from several of my small- to midsized clients about Heartbleed that have involved the most confusion; let’s clear up that misunderstanding! Read the rest of this entry »
Would a Proprietary OpenSSL Have Been More Secure than Open Source?
April 16th, 2014The OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability has resurrected the age-old debate of whether or not open source code is more or less secure than proprietary code. Before putting on your open source or proprietary jerseys and launching into this (frankly not-very-productive) fight, first consider a few things. Read the rest of this entry »
Rx for Incorrect Compliance Claims and XP
April 10th, 2014In the past couple of weeks I’ve gotten a couple dozen questions from my clients that are small to midsized covered entities (CEs) or business associates (BAs) under HIPAA, in addition to several small to midsized start-ups that provide services in other industries. And, while some of these concerns are arising out completely erroneous advice, regrettably, some of the questions resulted from my own mea culpa of writing a confusing sentence in my last blog post, for which I’ve since provided a clarification within. (Lesson: I need to spend more time double-checking/editing text prior to posting after doing edits to cut the length.) I apologize for any confusion or alarm that may have arisen as a result.
However, this does provide a good opportunity to examine in more depth the compliance issues related to Windows XP use, and the related questions I’ve received. The following are the most common questions I’ve answered in the past several days. Read the rest of this entry »
Will the Demise of XP Shut Down Your Business…or Heart?
March 25th, 2014If you haven’t heard yet, Windows XP will no longer be supported after April 8, 2014. That’s just a couple of weeks away! Why should you even care? Well, because you may have an important, or even mission-critical, computing device you use for your business, or for personal use, that is running on Windows XP. According to NetMarketShare at the end of February, 2014, 30% of all folks using Windows desktop computers were still running Windows XP. This is around ½ a BILLION computers, folks! After support ends, Read the rest of this entry »
NSA is not the Only One Getting to Your App Data
February 26th, 2014Do you think the NSA is the biggest threat to your privacy? Certainly they are collecting a significant amount of personal data. And from the looks of it, with their new facility that may hold up to 12 exabytes (that’s 12,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of data, they appear to be planning to continue collecting, and keeping, more data. This is an important topic, and I’ll look at in more depth in an upcoming blog post. But for now, you need to know and understand that there are many other entities that are collecting data from you and your mobile apps in the same way as NSA is slurping it up, along with several other ways. Read the rest of this entry »
