Leon Spencer reports: The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has revealed that it received more than 100 voluntary data breach notifications in the 12 months since changes to the country’s Privacy Act 1988 came into effect in March 2014. The OAIC said on Thursday that it had received 104 voluntary data breach notifications from the industry, 14,064 privacy…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Fear of data breaches leads 21% of patients to withhold information from physicians
Elizabeth Earl reports: The national attention on the risk of data breaches may be keeping patients from sharing information with physicians. A survey from Austin, Texas-based software advising firm Software Advice of 243 people found that 45 percent of respondents were moderately or very concerned about security breaches involving personal health information. Nearly a quarter,…
How Data-Breach Hype Undermines Your Security
Sue Marquette Paremba takes the media out to the wood shed for reporting on breaches in ways that repeat false claims of “sophisticated” attacks and that may leave us thinking that there’s nothing we can do to protect ourselves or better secure data we are responsible for: Some media outlets called last month’s data breach at health-insurance company…
A breach, a complaint and how the NZ Privacy Commissioner helped
From the job-well-done dept.: New Zealand’s Privacy Commissioner, John Edwards, writes: Late last year, one of my senior investigating officers came to me with a file she’d been working on for quite a while. She was convinced the facts supported a finding of an “interference with privacy”, that is, a breach of the privacy principles,…
Is Anthem screwing dependents of former members on breach notification? (update 2: No)
Update 2 (March 12). Because Anthem gave me the run-around instead of a straightforward answer, I asked a mainstream reporter from a large news outlet to pose the question to them. He managed to get an answer: Anthem is notifying all impacted members. The letters are being mailed as we speak. Because of the volume…
Changes Coming to Credit Agencies Won’t Stop Hackers
Jordan Robertson of Bloomberg reports: The three big U.S. credit-reporting agencies have agreed to be more helpful. Errors in your credit history will now be easier to correct and delinquent medical bills will take longer to hurt your credit score. An agreement announced Monday between New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion will limit the…