8 comments

• 

  Luis Villa

  2 years ago

  As I asked the first time you discussed this, Adam, why the focus on government? Private industry has lost plenty of laptops full of sensitive private information of citizens, like credit reports and social security numbers, and puts that kind of data on laptops all the time. [I know of at least one circumstance where an excel file with customer data of every customer the company had was put on the public, searchable internet- forget a laptop.]
  
  I agree strongly with you that this is a problem, but I wonder if your anti-government point of view isn't giving you blinders as to the nature of the problem and solutions. I'd rephrase 'fire any government employee who loses private data on a laptop' as 'imprison anyone who loses private data on a laptop', perhaps with some tie between length of sentence and number of citizens impacted. Clearly the current fines and prospective tort losses are not sufficient disincentive.
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  Peter Suderman

  2 years ago

  Luis,
  
  There's a huge difference between government-stored personal info and the info stored by private organizations. Much of the information the government has on you is given out on either a mandatory basis or something close (to live and work in this country, anyway). Information collected by a business, though, is given up voluntarily. We don't have a choice not to give out info to a government agency that demands it, meaning that any irresponsibility on their part won't cost them--there's no possibility of a market backlash when mandates are involved. That means that the government, if you think it needs to have personal data on file at all, has a unique responsibility to safeguard that information (and, I'd argue, to absolutely minimize the scope of the information it does collect and store).
• 

  dennis parrott

  2 years ago

  while i think luis is right -- corporate entities owe everyone privacy and confidentiality for our information the same way our government does -- i think the problem is really more of a system architecture issue.
  

  
  there are plenty of decent technologies for creating VPNs and doing end-to-end encryption. there are also plenty of ways to serve remote filesystems up to a user over a VPN. why is that sort of data EVER on an end user system period? it belongs on a remote filesystem served up securely over a VPN EVEN IN THE OFFICES!
  

  
  if the data never really leaves the nice comfy confines of the data center, losing the laptop, desktop or PDA that can connect to that data should not be that big of a deal unless the user has also compromised the security token along with the computer or PDA.
  

  
  instead of specifying stupid penalties and bureaucratic procedures that will make NO SENSE at all, we should get them to wise up and specify some intelligent modernization of their computing architectures so that laptops don't have that sort of data just lying about on the hard drive.
• 

  Luis Villa

  2 years ago

  Information collected by a business, though, is given up voluntarily.
  
  Hahahahhaa. I want to live on your planet, where you opted into credit reports, and you can live without regularly giving up your social security number, credit card number, phone number, etc. It sounds pretty nice. Imaginary (or perhaps you are neighbors with the Unabomber) but nice.
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