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The article Dump Your Social Media Strategy; it's not Customer Service - Forbes made me wonder if companies are still missing the point of social as badly as R. Tarkoff, CEO of Lithium, would have us believe.
Anyone with a thousand or more employees will likely have over 170, mostly unmanaged, s

Raises some realistic questions about the American approach to privacy law & regulation. Unfortunately, the article tends to point at the misapplication of laws more heavily than offering the reader an account of the abuses that led us to where we are now. Businesses & government, including the medical industry, freely shared details - or spied on Americans with impunity for decades. The article reminds us that work needs to continue to balance our approach. A Federal law, that sets a floor for privacy requirements, could help reduce conflicting requirements caused by almost every state writing seperate laws because there was a lack of leadership from Washington. American privacy regulations are implemented sectorally - at the industry or State level for example. This leads to many different, and conflicting laws. Privacy is a difficult subject with complex considerations touching aspects of life that have not been questioned for years. This article provides more con than balance, but it reminds us that extreme positions rarely serve anyone well.

Special interest groups and lawyers claim they are defenders of individual privacy. But all that red tape is causing more harm to consumers than good. In a world of tight budgets and sacrificed programs, one sector has continued to grow with the speed and choking effectiveness of kudzu: regulations around privacy. More than 300 privacy-related laws are on the books, in both Washington, D.C. and state capitals. Privacy-related consulting services provided by law and accounting firms are a $500-million-a-year business and have been growing at double digits.

Wharton School professor Andrea Matwyshyn has attended Defcon for the past five years. This year, her radar is pointing to corporate disclosure of computer security threats. Most consumers, she says, find out about them primarily through news reports and after-the-fact data breach notifications. Big business, Matwyshyn says, needs to do a much better job of keeping customers abreast of how they're dealing with big security threats. "Companies need to be aware that their customers are going to start asking questions about their security and what they're doing," she told Forbes.

The federal U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines calculator was developed by an innovative lawyer who was looking to develop a tool to help lawyers do the calculation for their clients.

Privacy & security are individual rights and responsibilities, not just corporate or governmental responsibilities. Reliance on technology is bound to fail without motivation for all involved to find mutual benefits.

Identity theft and security is always in the spotlight through the constant stream of news stories about companies losing confidential customer or client data, such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, health histories and so forth. These "breaking news" stories now seem to happen so frequently that we scarcely pay attention to them unless, of course, we are directly impacted by them. They have, however, heightened the public awareness and have even spawned new identity protection businesses. Information technology companies rightly react to this by developing new technologies to improve security and eagerly market these to CIOs as a way to protect the personal information of their customers and clients. While we should use these appropriately, we can't rely just on technology for identity protection. While some of these security incidents involve someone hacking into a system, many involve a human failing. Examples include a laptop with confidential information being lost or stolen and employees e-mailing sensitive data to their personal e-mail accounts so they can work on it from home.

For months somebody (I don't know who) has been running a Facebook profile that bears my name, my personal information and several photos of me. An old high school friend had connected with the faker, instead of me. Several of the people with whom fake Matt is friends also appeared to be fakes, including a copycat of Vertex Pharmaceuticals ( VRTX - news - people ) founder and chief executive Joshua Boger. (Boger has a real Facebook profile but isn't friends with me. He declined to comment on the fakesters.) I couldn't see this Fake Matt's profile myself, even by searching for my name.

A security breach at credit card processor and payroll services administrator Heartland Payment Systems Inc. has proven costly, driving the company to a first-quarter loss. The nation's sixth-largest payment processor reported a loss of $2.5 million, or 6 cents a share, compared with a profit of $9 million, or 23 cents a share, the year before. The results included expenses and accruals of $12.6 million, or 20 cents a share, resulting from a security breach in which criminals secretly installed spying software on its computer network.

Since Obama's landmark speech on cybersecurity in May, his administration hasn't revealed much about its long-percolating plans to shore up the government's defenses against hackers and cyberspies. But privacy advocates monitoring the initiative are already raising concerns about what they know and what they don't: the details that have trickled out--including the involvement of the National Security Agency--and the veil of classified information that still covers much of the multibillion-dollar project. "It feels like the Bush administration all over again," says Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum. "Not enough people know the details about these programs to have a good public discussion. We all want good security of government systems, but you have to balance the cloak and dagger elements with civil liberties."

The U.S. Department of Justice's indictment of Albert Gonzalez on Monday seems to have all the elements of a Hollywood crime drama: A hacker gains access to millions of credit and debit card numbers and has the power to take down a nation. Too bad for Tinseltown, the attack itself was about as sexy and a pile of routers. According to the indictment, Gonzalez, 28, gained a foothold into the systems of credit card processors such as Heartland Payment Systems ( HPY - news - people ) and retailers like OfficeMax ( OMX - news - people ), Barnes & Noble ( BKS - news - people ) and TJX Cos. ( TJX - news - people ) using an amateur hacking technique called "wardriving," which uses wireless access points to find vulnerable networks from which to launch attacks. Once connected to those private networks, Gonzalez used a well-known technique called "SQL injection" to trick Web applications into forking over private information that gave him deeper access into networks. Even though it sounds complicated, techies liken this kind of hack to simply turning the front doorknob to get into a house.

"Identity theft can happen to anyone," is the frequent refrain of government and advocacy groups warning consumers about bank fraud. What they don't add: The crime is far more likely when that "anyone" is a woman. A study released Monday by the fraud-tracking firm Javelin Research showed that women are 26% more likely than men to be the victims of identity theft. While 3.8% of men had their banking details stolen and used for fraud in the last year, 4.8% of women were victimized. And women took far longer on average to discover their financial identities had been compromised, leading to far greater risk of repeat fraud: Women took 83 days to detect they'd been targeted, compared with 45 days for men. The growing reason behind this disparity, argues Javelin President James Van Dyke, is an often-misunderstood trend: Digital commerce is making identity theft harder, rather than easier. Because men are statistically more likely than women to adopt newer technologies such as online banking and shopping, they more often have the benefit of high-tech safeguards, Van Dyke says. Women, because of their lesser use of Web banking and sales, suffer from more old-fashioned fraud caused by stolen credit cards or retail employees, he says. Fifty-eight percent of women, for instance, have never banked online, compared with 55% of men, according to Javelin's study. That means women are less likely to sign up for fraud protection programs like text message or e-mail alerts that warn of abnormal transactions. Twenty-three percent of men use e-mail alerts, compared with 15% of women; 8% of men receive text message warnings, compared with just 3% of women.