http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081214105048277
GMAC Mortgage announces office closings; employees take customer data
Tuesday, December 16 2008 @ 08:40 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
With the economy in what can only optimistically be described as a nose-dive, we're beginning to see more warnings about the risk of desperate, disgruntled or excessed employees taking data or propietary corporate information. But some of their warnings may have come a bit too late for GMAC Mortgage.
According to a notification letter to the Maryland Attorney General's Office, on September 3, the company announced the closing of its retail offices across the country and "put into place procedures to capture all assets in branch office locations including customer/consumer data."
But approximately a month later, two customers reported receiving mail from former employees at the Bedford, New Hampshire office.
An investigation by GMAC Mortgage revealed that prior to their end date, some loan officers had forwarded to themselves or associates customer lists containing customers' names, mailing addresses, and mortgage loan account numbers.
The company is currently pursuing legal remedies against seven former loan officers and Schaefer Mortgage in federal district court in New Hampshire, including seeking the return of customer data.
[No link to the notice itself, this is the link to the index: http://www.oag.state.md.us/idtheft/breacheNotices.htm
Only six states have an open database of breach reports?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F17%2F0019237&from=rss
Data Breach Notices Show Tip of the Iceberg
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 16, @07:39PM from the data-diving dept. Privacy Security
d2d writes
"The Data Loss Database has released a new feature: The Primary Sources Archive, a collection of breach notification letters gathered from various state governments as a result of data breach notification legislation. The documents include breaches that were largely unreported in the media, many of which are significant incidents of data loss. This lends credence to the iceberg theory of data-loss reporting, where many incidents never break the surface. Now, thanks to the Open Security Foundation, we can 'dive' for them."
You have to plan the entire process.
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081216094407258
When breach notifications breach privacy
Tuesday, December 16 2008 @ 09:44 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
Back in May, I reported a situation in which a breach notification letter to a state attorney general had revealed patient information, thereby creating yet another breach that was compounded by the publication of the notification letter on the Web. Because a similar web exposure problem recently occurred, I thought I would take a moment to point out what some CPOs, CSOs, and other reporting entities may not know or think about when they write their notification letters: if you file a mandated notification to states attorney general or another state agency or department under a state's mandated notification laws, your notification letters generally become public records that are obtainable under public records or freedom of information laws.
Six states currently maintain such central registries: New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maryland. Three of those (NH, VT, and NH) publish those notification letters on their web sites. The others make them obtainable under public records laws.
Even if you request that a notification be treated as propietary information, your report may become publicly available (although one state has not yet ruled on that).
Having to disclose a breach can be embarrassing enough. Revealing someone's personal information in your disclosure is even more embarrassing. When you include copies of your notification letters to affected individuals or other documentation concerning the breach, check to ensure that you have not included any actual individual's information in the letter. You'll thank me later.
The ultimate tabloid resource? Of course there will be consequences, but will they be consequential?
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081217072708859
UK: ‘Access all areas’ for media so justice is seen to be done
Wednesday, December 17 2008 @ 07:27 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
The secrecy of the family courts – in which nearly 95,000 cases are heard in private each year – is to end under reforms announced yesterday that will allow the media access to all levels of the system. The move could mean that social workers and expert witnesses who fail children, and now enjoy the protection of anonymity, will in future be named publicly when criticised by judges.
Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, said that from April the media would be permitted access to all family cases in all courts – from celebrity divorces to hearings over domestic violence or children being removed from families.
Source - Times Online
Not all policies are logical. Google was a big Obama supporter, should we read something into this? Surely it doesn't violate their “Do no evil” strategy, does it?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-10122713-46.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
Google censors political-donation transparency ads
Posted by Chris Soghoian December 16, 2008 7:55 PM PST
Should members of the public be able to pay for Web advertisements detailing which companies have donated to politicians? While this seems like a great way to promote transparency in politics, Google forbids the practice--we are free to name the politicians who take money but cannot name the companies that give it
... As this post will explore, Google's rather absurd, and little known, trademark policy seriously harms the ability of citizens to highlight the donations made to politicians by large corporations.
What analysis takes 90 days? (Perhaps they should use a computer?)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10125132-83.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
Yahoo to purge user data after 90 days
Posted by Larry Dignan December 17, 2008 5:04 AM PST
Yahoo said Wednesday that it will makes its user logs anonymous within 90 days as it ups the ante on data retention policies.
In a statement, Yahoo said it would also make user data on page views, page clicks, ad views and ad clicks anonymous as well as its user logs. The only exceptions would be for "fraud, security and legal obligations."
... In September, Google said it would make its user logs anonymous after nine months, a vast improvement over its previous 18-month policy.
Undue reliance: believing that the economic model that works sometimes will work every time...
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F16%2F2048235&from=rss
Computer Models and the Global Economic Crash
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 16, @05:03PM from the not-able-rightly-to-comprehend dept.
Anti-Globalism passes along a review in Ars of some recent speculation on the role of interconnected computer models in the global economic crash.
"If Ritholtz, Taleb, Mandelbrot, and the rest of the computer modeling and financial engineering naysayers are correct about the big picture, then we really are arguably in the midst a bona fide computer crash. Not an individual computer crash, of course, but a computer crash in the sense of Sun Microsystems' erstwhile marketing slogan, 'the network is the computer.' That is, we have all of these machines in different sectors of the economy, and we've networked all of them together either directly (via an actual network) or indirectly (by using the collective 'output' of machines in one sector as input for the machines in another sector), and like any other computer system the whole thing hums along nicely... up until the point when it doesn't."
This has happened many times before. Gutenberg probably got death threats from monks who made a living hand copying manuscripts. Radio was once King. TV has had its day, and I suspect YouTube is (eventually) doomed.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10124842-93.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
Good news for YouTube: Bullish video ad forecast
Posted by Stephen Shankland December 16, 2008 4:22 PM PST
Online advertising may be dragging, but one analyst firm expects the market for video ads to grow 45 percent to $850 million in 2009.
An eMarketer study released Tuesday forecast more growth in years to come: $1.25 billion in 2010, $1.85 billion in 2011, $3.0 billion in 2012, and $4.6 billion in 2013.
... TV ads, meanwhile, will shrink from $69.8 billion in 2008 to $66.9 billion in 2009, then down to $67.2 billion in 2010.
Related. Waiting for someone to chop down a tree and turn it into news-papyrus is just too Egyptian. If you can't be the single/best source of global news, you will have to be the best source of local news. (Two completely different strategies)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10124810-93.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
The Internet, the last hope of newspapers
Posted by Greg Sandoval December 16, 2008 3:07 PM PST
A "bold transformation" is how The Detroit News and The Detroit Free Press are trying to spin their decision to limit home delivery of their newspapers to three days a week.
While both said Tuesday that they will continue to issue traditional newspapers at newsstands seven days a week, they are the first daily newspapers from a major city to cutback home delivery.
Related. One heir to the telephone? Why talk to customer service when you can twit – and keep a log of the answers!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10124723-36.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
Twitter promotions can add up to millions
Posted by Caroline McCarthy December 16, 2008 2:17 PM PST
Computer giant Dell told Internet News that its "Twitter sale alerts" have added up to about $1 million in revenue.
As we all know from Mike Myers' "Dr. Evil" character in the Austin Powers movie franchise, a million bucks isn't a whole lot of money for a major multinational corporation. But it does have something to say about how Twitter is transforming from gimmicky messaging tool to marketing powerhouse. Fire-sale start-up Woot showed that it's possible to take advantage of Twitter's rapid-fire nature to advertise fleeting deals; shoe retailer Zappos has gotten praise for using Twitter for customer service.
Low-cost airline JetBlue, as the Internet News article points out, also uses Twitter for both fare deals and customer service.
More compelling is what this can mean for Twitter's own not-yet-existent business model, which looks like it might involve premium accounts for businesses using the service. With companies touting retail success, this could widen the window of opportunity for Twitter to start encouraging them to, well, pay up.
Related – because serious gamers want the best technology they can get. (Gameboy killed game boards?)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10125085-62.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
More games moving to the cloud
Posted by Dave Rosenberg December 16, 2008 11:45 PM PST
The Shack reports that Electronic Arts might be moving Spore to the Steam cloud-based gaming platform. An EA end-user license agreement showed up on Steam demonstrating that if nothing else, the company is testing out the idea.
Spore was the most pirated game of 2008, and if you are EA, you have to look at other ways to deliver games to the masses. With Steam, EA not only increases its distribution possibilities, but it also gets a better platform with a more user-friendly DRM function.
Similar to the Zotero Firefox add-in. This is becoming an interesting tool category for researchers.
http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/syncone-net-a-new-internet-aggregator
SyncOne.net - A New Internet Aggregator
Broadly speaking, SyncOne is an Internet aggregator that enables users to save information from any page via a mere mouse click. The information that is thus stored can be accessed from anywhere there is an Internet connection, and this system has the distinct advantage of letting you access contents you have saved even when the page or site in question has gone down.
The basic concept at play is that of webclips. The term refers to portions or snippets of web pages that are saved for ulterior reference. SyncOne makes it possible to save information this way, and use it for study, research and comparison.
Moreover, there is a prominent social aspect at play since users of this web-based application can interact with each other through the site. This gives them a ready chance to discuss on the snippets they have saved, and see if they come across new relevant items this way.
When all is said and done, sites such as this one offer a different way of storing and sharing online information. If you feel such an approach will click with you, I advice you to pay the site a visit in order to have a taster for yourself.
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