Personal Data Breaches - Your Data "In The Wild": Commentary - Secure the Data Already

Your private data is everywhere. Your identity is valuable and if it is compromised, the economic, emotional and even physical damage can almost never be reversed.

With every purchase you make online, every major purchase like a home or car, each account you open with a bank, broker or insurance agent, health care agency, doctor, or even when you apply for basic services such as telephone or power you are "required by these providers" to release information such as your name, address, social security number, phone number, date of birth, credit card numbers, spouse and children's names, dates of birth, and other private data that is unique to your identity. Most of this data is collected under the guise of verifying your identity or to fulfill some government mandate or industry guideline to validate their internal procedures. The question is, what happens with this data?

There are several US Government laws that regulate what can and cannot be done with certain types of personally identifiable information. Each of these laws have penalties for breaches of the requirements. The sad truth is that almost none of these laws are enforced even when a very public breach has occurred.

As an example, HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), a law that deals with the collection, maintenance and release of individual private health information established both criminal and civil penalties for the unlawful release of patient data. This legislation took effect in April 2003. The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) within the Department of Health and Human Services is charged with investigating and prosecuting complaints. As of March 2006, the OCR has received over 18,000 complaints regarding the unlawful release of individual patient data, they have yet to impose a single civil penalty. As of March 28, 2006, there have been only two criminal convictions under HIPAA. One was a Texas woman Liz Arlene Ramirez who was arrested after agreeing to sell the information of FBI agents to people whom she believed to be a drug trafficker and the other was a man in Seattle caught using patients information to fraudulently obtain credit cards. HIPAA, like most other laws dealing with privacy of financial transactions, banking, or other regulations designed to protect your data is quite literally NEVER enforced.

So, how can you secure YOUR data? iQBio has several industry leading products that can help any person, business or government agency secure and control local or portable data with multi-factor authentication and encryption. Secure the data already... enough is enough.

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