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Identity thieves using the names and Social Security numbers of Irving Independent School District employees have made thousands of dollars in purchases, school officials say. One woman has been accused of fraudulent use or possession of identifying information and two charges of credit card abuse. A second person linked to the theft case has been arrested but no charges have yet been filed in the Irving case, authorities said. At least 64 of the 3,400 teachers and other employees whose names were on the old benefits report that somehow ended up in the trash have said they are identity theft victims. The school district mailed letters to current and former employees about the breach, but 472 of the letters were returned as undeliverable. Pat Lamb, district security director, said in a story for Sunday's online edition of The Dallas Morning News that the employees at risk of being on the list worked for the district in the 2000-01 school year and had payroll deductions for benefits. "We still do not know how our records were compromised," Lamb said. "We don't know if somebody was supposed to shred that information, but it ended up in a Dumpster." Lamb said his name was among those on the report, which was generated in 2000. Cynthia Will, a former teacher, pleaded for help from the school board last week. More than $25,000 was charged in her name, including a $4,000 diamond ring, the newspaper reported. "It was stunning the damage that was done in just seven days," she told the board. Will has to carry an affidavit stating that she is an identity theft victim and if there are warrants on her old driver's license number that they are not for her. Dawn Bizzell, who has taught in the district since 1996, said district officials acted too slowly. An employee advisory wasn't posted until Jan. 26. Bizzell said she learned she was an identity theft victim on Nov. 28 and police told her of the district connection on Dec. 3.

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With the nation's strictest data security law set to take effect Jan. 1 in Massachusetts, mobile phone merchant Dennis Kelly plans to parlay the regulations into a competitive advantage. Kelly will display signs at each point-of-sale device inside 28 Wireless City shops, of which he is co-owner, stating that the company complies with the state's new mandate and that protecting customers' personal information is a company-wide priority. He says that as his business has grown in a few short years, adhering to the new requirements - namely, establishing an official information security policy and deploying more stringent access control solutions - was necessary, regardless of the impending legal obligation. And now he wants to show that investment off. "We can set ourselves apart from competitors by communicating that we take this stuff seriously," he says. "I think we will be somewhat unique in that regard." Kelly's take on the regulations - the first time any state has issued such a comprehensive and prescriptive list of measures that must be taken to protect data - appears to be in direct contrast to most other business owners across the Bay State.

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Last week, the government took another step toward closing a legal loophole in federal privacy and security rules for emerging Health 2.0 information technology applications by issuing proposed rules aimed at covering an estimated 900 companies and organizations offering personal health records and electronic systems connected to them. The Federal Trade Commission was careful to point out its new interim proposed rule on federal breach notification requirements for the developers of electronic PHR systems did not apply to covered organizations or their business associates as defined by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, heretofore the key federal privacy and security regulation. The FTC, operating under new authority given it by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, noted that its new rule seeks to cover previously unregulated entities that are part of a Health 2.0 product mix. FTC staff estimates that about 200 PHR vendors, another 500 related entities and 200 third-party service providers will be subject to the new breach notification rule. The staffers estimate that the 900 affected companies and organizations, on average, will experience 11 breaches each per year at a total cost of about $1 million per group, per year. Costs include investigating the breach, notifying consumers and establishing toll-free numbers for explaining the breaches and providing additional information to consumers. Pam Dixon, founder and executive director of the World Privacy Forum, said that this isn't the first involvement of the FTC in healthcare-related regulation, noting the consumer protection agency joined with the Food and Drug Administration in a joint statement on the marketing of direct-to-consumer genetic tests. The FTC also has worked in the field of healthcare competition. She noted the compliance deadline with the FTC's "red flag rules" on provider organizations that provide consumer credit to patients for installment payment

Laws in Canada and other countries are increasingly helping technology force people to identify themselves where they never had to before, threatening privacy that allows people to function effectively in society, a new study has found. "What we're starting to see is a move toward making people more and more identifiable," University of Ottawa law professor Ian Kerr said Wednesday. His comments followed the launch of Lessons from the Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society, a book summing up the study's findings, at a public reading in downtown Ottawa hosted jointly with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Kerr led the study with University of Ottawa criminology professor Valerie Steeves. They collaborated with 35 other researchers in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands and Italy. The researchers reported that governments are choosing laws that require people to identify themselves and are lowering judicial thresholds defining when identity information must be disclosed to law enforcement officials. That is allowing the wider use of new technologies capable of making people identifiable, including smartcards, security cameras, GPS, tracking cookies and DNA sequencing. Consequently, governments and corporations are able to do things like: * Embrace technologies such as radio frequency identification tags that can be used to track people and merchandise to analyze behaviour. * Boost video surveillance in public places. * Pressure companies such as internet service providers to collect and maintain records of identification information about their customers. While Canada, the U.K., the Netherlands and Italy all have national laws protecting privacy - that is, laws that allow citizens to control access to their personal data - such legal protection does not exist for anonymity, Kerr said. "Canada is quite similar [to other countries] with respect to anonymity. Namely, it's shrinking here just as it is there.

Banks and financial firms are placing more emphasis on internal threats to cut the flow of data leakage as a result of employee mistakes or workers disgruntled with layoffs and downsizing during the economic crisis, according to a recent survey. The report, "Protecting What Matters: The Sixth Annual Global Security Survey," is based on a Deloitte survey of 250 CISOs in the financial-services industry. It found that 36% of respondents believe the internal threat represents the greatest risk to organizations, compared to 13% who said external threats are the biggest concern. Mark Steinhoff, head of Deloitte's financial services security and privacy practices, said an organization's biggest mistake would be to let its guard down. While the number of security breaches may have declined over the last year, cybercriminals are not rationing back their efforts. "The number of breaches that are occurring are really at the hands of insiders and organizations are understanding that there is a real threat of malicious attacks and exposure of personal information by insiders," Steinhoff said. The failing economy may be driving the increased concern over insider threats, Steinoff said. "The climate we're in today causes concerns about disgruntled employees," he said. "We are seeing the layoffs and other forms of downsizing. Frankly with limited budget and less than satisfied employees, it really raises the parameter on that threat." Human error is the leading cause of information systems failure, and is likely to be the main cause of security attacks in the near future, according to 86% of those surveyed. To protect against employee mistakes that lead to a breach, financial firms should focus on risk rather than compliance to protect themselves, Steinhoff said. "[Organizations] need to look at what they want to protect and look at various types of threats internally and evaluate who has access to the data and who has access to which system, and approach it from that persp

One of the more interesting panel discussions at the IDC Cloud Computing Forum on Feb 18th in San Francisco was about managing the complexities of security, privacy and compliance in the Cloud. The simple answer according to panelists Carolyn Lawson, CIO of California Public Utilities Commission, and Michael Mucha, CISO of Stanford Hospital and Clinics is "it ain't easy!" "Both of us, in government and in health, are on the front-lines," Lawson proclaimed. "Article 1 of the California Constitution guarantees an individual's right to privacy and if I violate that I've violated a public trust. That's a level of responsibility that most computer security people don't have to face. If I violate that trust I can end up in jail or hauled before the legislature," she said. "Of course, these days with the turmoil in the legislature, she joked, "the former may be preferable to the later." Stanford's Mucha said that his security infrastructure was built on a two-tiered approach using identity management and enterprise access control. Mucha said that the movement to computerize heath records nationwide was moving along in fits and starts, as shown by proposed systems likeMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Health Vault and Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s Personal Health Record. "The key problem is who is going to pay for the computerized of health records. It's not as much of a problem at Stanford as it is at a lot of smaller hospitals, but it's still a huge problem." Mucha said that from his perspective security service providers in the cloud and elsewhere are dealing with a shrinking security parameter or fence, which is progressing from filing cabinets, to devices, to files, and finally to the individual, who under the latest Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy rules has certain rights, including rights to access and amend their health information and to obtain a record of when and why their Protected Health Information (PHI) record has bee

Following on the heels of Facebook's decision to rescind a highly controversial move to store all content posted on the social network, new data has emerged to support consumers' increasing alarm over online privacy. The vast majority--80.1%--of Web surfers are indeed concerned about the privacy of their personal information such as age, gender, income and Web-surfing habits, according to a survey of some 4,000 Web users administered and analyzed by Burst Media. More worrisome, perhaps, is the finding that privacy concerns are prevalent among all age segments, including younger demographics that are coming of age online. Still, privacy concerns do appear to increase with age, from 67.3% among respondents ages 18-24 to 85.7% of respondents 55 years and older. "Online privacy is a prevailing concern for web surfers," said Chuck Moran, vice president of marketing for Burst Media. The survey was administered by Burst with the purpose of better understanding how privacy is impacting Web users' experiences online, as well as its impact on advertisers. "Advertisers must take concrete actions to mitigate consumers' privacy concerns and at the same time continue to deliver their message as effectively as possible," Moran added. "In addition, and as recently seen in the news flare up regarding Facebook's privacy controversy, publishers need to be completely transparent about their privacy policies." Facebook recently changed its terms of use agreement, which gave the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company the ability to store user-posted photos and other content, even after it was deleted by users themselves. Earlier this week, however, the company reverted to a previous version of its legal user guidelines after thousands of members protested that Facebook was claiming ownership over the content. In addition, the Burst survey found that most Web users believe Web sites are tracking their behavior online. Three out of five--62.5%--respondents indicated it is likely that a W

A U.S. appeals court on Friday denied a bid by the cable industry to overrule privacy rules that make it more difficult for them to share subscribers' personal information with other parties. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied a petition by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, which argued that federal rules on telecom carriers' use of customer data violated free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution, federal law or both. At issue are rules set by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that mandate telecommunications carriers must get an "opt-in" before disclosing customers' information to a carrier's joint venture business partner or an independent contractor.

A New Zealand man has found confidential United States military files on an MP3 player he bought at an op shop in the US. Chris Ogle, 29, from Whangarei, bought the player from an Oklahoma thrift shop for $NZ18 ($A14.50), and found the files when he hooked it up to his computer, TV One News reported on Monday night. The 60 files on the player contained the names and personal details of American soldiers, including ones who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. There was also information about equipment deployed to bases and a mission briefing. "The more I look at it, the more I see and the less I think I should be," Ogle said. Victoria University strategic studies director Peter Cozens said one of the first rules of military endeavour was to not give the opposition information that could compromise your position. "This is just slack administrative procedures which are indeed a cause of embarrassment. It's the sort of thing which ought not really be in the public domain, he said. Ogle said the player never worked as a music player and he would hand it over to the US Defence Department if asked.

Until now, lawsuits seeking to recover significant damages based on the loss of, or unauthorized access to, sensitive personal information have not been especially successful for plaintiffs. Most companies suffering data breaches have escaped by offering affected consumers inexpensive credit monitoring services. But two recent cases show plaintiffs a way to expose many previously safe companies to substantial claims for damages. Any company that thinks there are no risks in employing less than best practices for data privacy and security needs a wake up call. The headlines are all too familiar. Some well known consumer services company (or less known wholesale data processor) announces that millions of individual records containing names, Social Security numbers, account numbers and other sensitive information were left in a dumpster, saved to a stolen, unencrypted laptop, or stored on a misplaced USB drive or backup tape. The press is terrible, the company's stock takes a temporary plunge, and sometimes the Federal Trade Commission enters into a consent decree where the company promises to never do it again. But when affected individuals or groups of consumers tried to sue for damages, they seldom recover significant amounts. These cases have not often succeeded because the plaintiffs have been unable to prove actual pecuniary losses resulting from the security breach. Sure, if identify theft occurs the affected individuals can suffer significant emotional trauma, loss of time, etc. But Courts have been unwilling to award damages for anxiety, fear, and other emotional harm that can result from a data breach, for the risk of future identify theft, or for actual identity theft when the plaintiff could not prove that the theft occurred as a direct result of a data breach at a particular source. Most companies facing claims based on data breaches have been able to settle cheaply by offering to provide credit monitoring services, which most consumers do not use, resu

Four HIV-positive patients whose records were left behind on an MBTA train by a Massachusetts General Hospital employee are suing the hospital, claiming their privacy has been breached. In March the hospital notified 66 patients who received care at its Infectious Disease Associates outpatient practice that billing records bearing their names, Social Security numbers, doctors, and diagnoses had been lost by a manager who was riding the Red Line. She had brought the paperwork home for the weekend, but left it on the train when she returned to work the morning of Monday, March 9, according to hospital security reports. Last week two patients who are HIV-positive filed a suit in Suffolk Superior Court against the hospital and the unidentified billing manager. The unnamed plaintiffs have been joined by two other HIV-positive people. The legal action was first reported in the weekly newspaper Bay Windows. Their lawyer, John Yasi of the Salem law firm Yasi and Yasi, said in an interview he has filed a motion to make the suit a class action that could cover all 66 patients, a significant number of whom are also HIV-positive. "The damages that jump out are the emotional distress surrounding the loss of obviously very sensitive medical information and secondarily the loss of personal security information," he said. "A Social Security number in reality may lead to identity theft, which we all know is a nightmare."

A third (34 per cent) of discarded hard disk drives still contain confidential data, according to a new study which unearthed copies of hospital records and sensitive military information on eBayed kit. The study, sponsored by BT and Sims Lifecycle Services and run by the computer science labs at University of Glamorgan in Wales, Edith Cowan University in Australia and Longwood University in the US, also found network data and security logs from the German Embassy in Paris on one purchased drive. Researchers bought 300 drives from eBay, other auction sites, second-hand stalls and car boot sales. A disk bought on eBay contained details of test launch routines for the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) ground to air missile defence system. The same disk also held information belonging to the system's manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, including blueprints of facilities and personal data on workers, including social security numbers. Lockheed Martin denies that the disk came from it. The arm manufacturer has launched an investigation that aims to uncover just how the sensitive data might have been wound up on the disk. Two discs bought in the UK apparently came from Lanarkshire NHS Trust, including patient medical records, images of X-rays and staff letters. Lanarkshire NHS Trust runs the Monklands and Hairmyres hospitals. In Australia, the exercise turned up a disk from a nursing home that contained pictures of actual patients and their wound photos, along with patient details. A hard disk from a US bank contained account numbers and details of plans for a $50bn currency exchange through Spain. Details of business transactions between the bank and organisations in Venezuela, Tunisia and Nigeria were also included. Correspondence between a member of the Federal Reserve Board and the unnamed banks revealed that one of the deals was already under scrutiny by the European Central Bank, and that federal investigators were also taking an interest. Yet anothe

The federal GLBA, HIPAA, FACTA and its Red Flags and Disposal Rules, state data Breach Notification Laws and many other federal and state laws and industry regulations like PCI-DSS are intended to protect the privacy and security of consumer's personally identifiable and financial information entrusted to businesses and other organizations. Many suchidentity theft, id theft, government security, government privacy regulations aim to prevent identity theft and privacy violations. While some businesses have been negligent in securing information, other businesses have been victimized by black hat hackers or "crackers" who operate ahead of the cybersecurity technology curve. Cybersecurity is an ongoing challenge for businesses and for government as discussed in the President's Cyberspace Policy Review. In the four-year period ending in 2008, 23% of all data breaches reported were attributed to hackers. For those data breaches involving more than one million profiles, hacking was identified as the cause in 66% of the breaches according to a recent research report on data breach risk factors.

"HIPAA was never intended for the digital age, because the 1996 HIPAA law never anticipated the emergence of Web-based records." -- David Brailer, former national coordinator for Health Information Technology "Before increasing federal spending on health IT, Congress should first fix the already-outdated 1996 HIPAA privacy rule to ensure individuals have control over their personal health information," said Sue A. Blevins, president of the Institute for Health Freedom (IHF). "Right now, the HIPAA privacy rule has too many loopholes to ensure true patient privacy."

The Federal Trade Commission is planning three public discussions, starting in December, devoted to technology and consumer privacy. According to the FTC, the roundtables will address topics such as social networking, cloud computing, online advertising and mobile marketing, the goal being "to determine how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting beneficial uses of the information and technological innovation." Behavioral advertising, in particular, has come under fire by privacy groups. Earlier this month, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumers Union and other related organizations called for stronger rules limiting what kinds of personal information are collected by marketers and how long they can hold on them.

"If you use a Groupon mobile app and you allow sharing through your device, Groupon may collect geo-location information from the device and use it for marketing deals to you (and for other purposes listed in the 'How Groupon Uses Personal Information' section of the Updated Privacy Statement)," the email states. Groupon adds that the changes also address some new types of business relationships the company is forging and new technologies it is implementing or may use.

Perhaps Mark Z is surprised that people actually read terms of service. Arrogant twit. He's a multi-millionaire who cares about the little people (stage direction: Mark Z looks sincerely into web cam as he wipes away tear with hundred dollar bill). Perhaps the Tweens don't understand what social networking sites really sell; looks like some grown ups started asking where all their personal information is going and when it might inconveniently show up in some ad campaign.

A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. Many of us at Facebook spent most of today discussing how best to move forward. One approach would have been to quickly amend the new terms with new language to clarify our positions further. Another approach was simply to revert to our old terms while we begin working on our next version. As we thought through this, we reached out to respected organizations to get their input. Going forward, we've decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don't plan to leave it there for long. More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren't just a document that protect our rights; it's the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world. Given its importance, we need to make sure the terms reflect the principles and values of the people using the service. Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we'll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms. You have my commitment that we'll do all of these things, but in order to do them right it will take a little bit of time. We expect to complete this in the next few we

"If you live in Texas, your medical records are definitely up for sale by the state. If you live anywhere else in the United States, they probably are for sale there, too. Medical health records provide key information to researchers, who have lobbied hard to keep them accessible, despite government concerns about the privacy of patient data. The controversy dates back to 1996, when Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to protect patients. "Researchers have very broad access rights to health care records under HIPAA," says Pam Dixon, director of a non-profit called the World Privacy Forum "The rules are pretty loose, and there are a lot of ways to get around them." That's especially true since the act wasn't designed to cover common scenarios today: records stored online in a vast, hackable cloud. In the rush to digitize all electronic health records, Dixon says not everyone is taking the proper steps to de-personalize the data and protect patients."

Parents of 18,541 Metro Nashville students will receive letters next week outlining a security breach that put their children's Social Security numbers online for three months. Advertisement Boston-based Public Consulting Group Inc., which holds a five-year, $2.6-million-a-year contract with the state to collect student data from various districts, corrected the error March 31 after a parent using Google to search her daughter's name found it - along with personal data for the students and 6,000 parent names. Art Staehling learned Wednesday that his teenage daughter was on the list and said he's concerned what could happen to her identity. "I find it hard to believe that an established company had a problem of this magnitude," Staehling said. The consulting group will pay for parents of affected children to check all family members' credit reports through Experian and for a year of monitoring. One of the group's owners, Stephen Skinner, said the error happened when workers running a test Dec. 28 on random student data inadvertently stored a file to an insecure directory. They discovered the error March 5 and took down the file, which contained student names, gender, race or ethnicity, date of birth, Social Security number and, in some cases, parent names. But they were unaware Google's search engine had already found the file and indexed it. That's how the parent, who is also a Metro schools employee, found out about the breach weeks later. Public Consulting Group worked with Google to take the information down.

Better to settle with the FTC than get your company's reputation as consumer-friendly (deserved or not) dragged through the court of public opinion.

Sears Holdings has agreed to settle allegations it collected personal data from customers without adequate disclosures, the Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday. The FTC had accused Sears Holdings, created in 2005 with the merger of Sears and Kmart, of paying online customers $10 to allow the company to track their online browsing. But the FTC said Sears also collected information on non-Sears sites, such as online bank statements, drug prescription records and emails. "The software would also track some computer activities that were not related to the Internet," the FTC said in a statement. Sears did disclose all it would monitor in a lengthy user license agreement, but the FTC argued it was not enough. "The complaint charges that Sears' failure to adequately disclose the scope of the tracking software's data collection was deceptive and violates the FTC Act," the FTC said in a statement. Sears did not immediately reply to two telephone calls and one email seeking a comment. Under the settlement, Sears is required to destroy the data collected and make future disclosures more prominent.