The story of how Massachusett Governor William Weld’s de-identified medical records were quickly re-identified in 1997 by then-graduate student Latanya Sweeney is now legendary in discussions of the risks of sharing “anonymized” or “de-identified” health records that might foster research. In an article on Scientific American, Erica Klarreich describes a mathematical technique called “differential privacy” that could give researchers…
Author: Dissent
The long arm of Connecticut law supports personal jurisdiction over Canadian employee accessing company’s U.S. server
Evan Brown provides a recap of the ruling in in MacDermid, Inc. v. Deiter. The relevant background of the case is that an employee of a U.S. firm who lived and worked in Canada allegedly accessed her firm’s server in Connecticut from her Canadian location and forwarded confidential corporate information from her work e-mail account to…
Happy New Year!
I wish a Healthy and Happy New Year to all those who have read or contributed to DataBreaches.net in 2012. Each day, I never knew what my e-mail or tweet stream would bring, but readers provided thoughtful comments, tips, and great suggestions. Now let’s just hope that 2013 brings us better data security by those…
Your Mobile Device and Health Information Privacy and Security
In light of a recent blog post about nurses using their own smartphones to enter clinical data, I thought this might be a good time to point readers to HHS’s recent resources for securing mobile devices. Their top tips: 1. Use a password or other user authentication 2. Install and enable encryption 3. Install and activate remote wiping…
Kroll Advisory Solutions Releases 2013 Cyber Security Forecast
Right before the holidays, Kroll Advisory Solutions released its predictions and advisory. They identified four unexpected cyber forces to be reckoned with in 2013 and offered some recommendations for addressing them: 1. Vampire Data: Organizations Get Bitten by the Data They Never Knew They Had Data exists in myriad locations and in a multitude of formats…
Prosecutors dismiss charges against 5 Japanese app developers accused of data theft by virus
It seemed to have the makings of a big news story almost two months ago when The Japan Times reported and the Hacker News spread the word that Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police had arrested five mobile app developers for creating and embedding a virus into smartphone applications that downloaded the users’ contacts. But now it appears that the case…