Let’s not blame Big Brother when the fault lies with an incompetent, private sector administrator

More and more data about us is milling about online, ready to be used or abused as others see fit. But this isn't always hacked – much is just sitting there unencrypted. And although the main target of Big Brother Watch, we should be clear about the fact that it isn't always coercive government who's to blame – much data is accumulated by companies and businesses with whom we choose do business, who then go on to fail to act responsibly with it as they should.

Just two examples from a must-read article over at the Wall Street Journal:

A file containing names, social-security numbers and home phone numbers of about 1,000 current and former Atlanta Fire Rescue employees was discovered online in April by city officials.

Until May, social-security and driver's-license numbers of hundreds of people associated with Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Fla., were on the Internet and indexed by search engines.

Such examples abound in the USA, where identity theft is up 12% to over 11 million cases a year.

Of course many databases should never be built by intrusive government in the first place; much data accumulated by our lords and masters is none of their business and even setting aside the time and expense incurred in the snooping and accumulating, the likelihood of loss should have meant that they didn't build them. But many other databases are built in the private sector, which then falls down on the job when supposedly guarding them. And it is common:

Often data come from breaches where hackers have bypassed weak security systems, said Steven Peisner, president of Sellitsafe Inc., which helps merchants avoid processing fraudulent purchases. He estimates he sees about 15,000 or so stolen accounts being published each month in these dark corners of the Internet.

Sometimes, employees who have made illegal copies of information are the thieves. A Bank of America Corp. employee this month pleaded guilty to charges that he stole and tried to sell account information of high-worth customers.

This is the world we live in. People are always going to try to steal data – it has value, and it is therefore going to be a target for theft and misuse. As that's a given, we should not only demand that government performs well with the information about us it acquires – we should also expect those in the private sector with whom we enter into voluntary agreements to act responsibly and robustly in safeguarding our information, too.

Bear this in mind the next time you open an account with a bank, or sign up for something online…

By Alex Deane