Posts Tagged ‘encryption’

Big Brother Likes Big Data – Balancing Privacy with Innovation

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

My 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, 2012

Last 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, 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…)

Encryption: Myths and Must Knows

Friday, March 2nd, 2012

I am looking forward to the day when we can look at the news headlines and not see some report about a lost or stolen computing device or storage device that contained unencrypted personal information and/or other sensitive information.  And, I also want to stop seeing stories reappear about such an incident, such as the stolen NASA laptop with the clear text Space Station control codes that was stolen last year, but is making the headlines yet again today.  NASA is a large enough, and tech savvy enough, organization to know better!  However, there are many organizations that simply don’t understand what a valuable information security tool encryption is.   I work with many small to medium sized businesses (SMBs), all of which have legal obligations (such as through HIPAA and HITECH, along with contractual requirements) to protect sensitive information, such as personal information.  Over the past year I’ve heard way too many of them make remarks such as… (more…)

KPMG HIPAA Auditor Caused a Data Breach

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

A KPMG auditor caused a breach for New Jersey hospitals because he or she lost an unencrypted flash drive containing over 4,500 patient records. (more…)

Health Net Incident Impacting 1.9 Million: Lessons Learned

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

Yesterday 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…

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Don’t Throw Your Privacy Out The Window; Know How Your PII Is Used

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

A couple of week’s ago I had the great opportunity and pleasure to speak with the both equally delightful and brilliant Anyck Turgeon and Scott Draughon on MyTechnologyLawyer.com about Is encryption enough to achieve privacy?”
The feedback and followup to that show was spectacular! I got a ton of questions as a result. I will answer some of them here in the coming days. Here is the first…

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Is Encryption Enough to Achieve Privacy?

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Of course the answer is no. But there are many reasons! Tune in this afternoon at 4:00pm Pacific time to hear Anyck Turgeon, Scott Draughon and me discuss this topic and talk about encryption laws and the impacts to privacy. Here is the information about the event…

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Nevada’s New Encryption Law; Made Moot By Its Own Data Breach Law?

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

On May 30, 2009, Nevada enacted a new law, SB 227, which will basically replace NRS 597.970 in January 2010.
In many ways the new law is an improvement over the much more vague, and brief, NRS 597.970. I want to focus here on an improvement, but something that still leaves much to interpretation; that is, what is meant by “encryption”?

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Encryption Solution Reviews

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

Here are some encryption solution reviews, from David Strom at PC World, that anyone who wants to protect their laptop data, as well as information security, and yes privacy, practitioners should find useful…

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