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…)
Posts Tagged ‘breach’
Big Brother Likes Big Data – Balancing Privacy with Innovation
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012My 12-year-old son said to me yesterday after getting home from school, “Hey, Mommy, did you know that Wal-Mart can tell when you’re pregnant? And so can Target! Even before anyone else knows! They got a girl in trouble when they sent her dad coupons for baby stuff and congratulated her!”
Me, “That’s pretty incredible, isn’t it? Companies are able to discover things like that about people more than ever before through analyzing what is called ‘Big Data’.”
Son, “That’s really creepy. I think you should (more…)
Back to the Future Security Basics: Security through Obscurity Still Does Not Work
Tuesday, April 17th, 2012Last week I provided Howard Anderson at HealthInfosecurity.com with some of my thoughts about the recent Utah Department of Health breach of the files of 900,000 individuals, and counting. He included some of my thoughts in his blog post, along with thoughts from others. I wanted to provide my full reply here, along with some expanded thoughts.
As background, for those of you who may not have heard of this hack yet, in a nutshell: (more…)
6 Good Reasons to De-Identify Data
Friday, March 30th, 2012De-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…)
Don’t Let School Break Be A Privacy Break-In!
Friday, June 3rd, 2011A couple of days ago I published my monthly Privacy Professor Tips message, “Summer Break-in.” I provide these tips free to anyone who wants to sign up for it on my web site and fills out one of the boxes that says, (more…)
Health Net Incident Impacting 1.9 Million: Lessons Learned
Wednesday, April 6th, 2011Yesterday I provided some thoughts to Howard Anderson at HealthinfoSecurity.com about the recent Health Net incident for his article. Here are some expanded thoughts for his questions…
