Early this month I was happy to discuss synthetic identity theft on the Great Day show. I briefly talked about how synthetic identity theft was also committed in the U.S. using business employer identity numbers (EINs). Crooks often target small and midsize businesses for this type of crime. After the show I got a lot of questions asking for more information about synthetic EIN identity theft. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘privacy’
Businesses are Also Synthetic ID Theft Targets
Monday, July 21st, 201410 Big Data Analytics Privacy Problems
Thursday, June 26th, 2014Big data analytics are being used more widely every day for an even wider number of reasons. These new methods of applying analytics certainly can bring innovative improvements for business. For example, retail businesses are successfully using big data analytics to predict the hot items each season, and to predict geographic areas where demand will be greatest, just to name a couple of uses.
The power of big data analytics is so great that in addition to all the positive business possibilities, there are just as many new privacy concerns being created. Here are ten of the most significant privacy risks. (more…)
Choose: $50 Credit Card Fraud Limit or Unlimited Privacy Damage?
Friday, June 6th, 2014So today AT&T announced plans to test a service allowing payment card providers to access the location of a customer’s phone to improve the accuracy of fraud prevention systems for transactions made abroad. AT&T customers will have to opt-in to the fraud protection service, which will also be me made available to enterprise customers later this year.
Antone Gonsalves asked me for my opinions about the privacy implications, which he included some of within his article he published on CSO Online today. However, I wanted to make several more points to follow-on to his article. (more…)
Privacy Lessons from Snapchat
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2014There 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: (more…)
Dairy Queen Will Trade Your Privacy and Safety for Free Ice-cream Cake!
Friday, 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): (more…)
Rx for Incorrect Compliance Claims and XP
Thursday, 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. (more…)
Will the Demise of XP Shut Down Your Business…or Heart?
Tuesday, 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, (more…)
NSA is not the Only One Getting to Your App Data
Wednesday, 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. (more…)
