If you use Facebook, don’t wait to change your privacy settings

In a privacy policy change announced recently and effective on December 9, social networking supersite Facebook made significant changes to the default privacy settings for all Facebook users. In some cases the default settings announced disclose…

House passes Data Accountability and Trust Act

Legislation passed by the House of Representatives this week (H.R. 2221, the Data Accountability and Trust Act) includes provisions both for national standards on data breach notifications and adding new responsibilities and consumer empowerment protections to…

Data loss lessons from TSA disclosure

As reported on Wednesday in the Washington Post and elsewhere, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) inadvertently disclosed sensitive information about its airline passenger screening practices by posting a document containing this information online. The mistakes involved…

Progress in securing health records, but still a long way to go

An excellent article this week in InformationWeek by Mitch Wagner provides an nice overview of the privacy and security issues related to widespread deployment of electronic medical records, noting both the recent progress made in these…

Sometimes a breach is data theft, sometimes it’s business as usual

Among the latest unauthorized disclosures of personal information making headlines is the admission last week by T-Mobile that thousands of its British customers had essentially become pawns in a “black market” for mobile service subscriber information…

Policies without enforcement simply aren’t enough to guard against internal threats

Two recent studies of financial sector employees, sponsored by security vendors Cyber-Ark and Actimize, and reported last week by Tim Wilson of InformationWeek, indicate that employees are ready and willing to steal information from their employers,…

Structural reorganization announced for government health IT oversight

In a Federal Register notice effective December 1, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT announced a reorganization of its office. Among the most notable changes is the decision to create the position of…