530M records exposed, and counting
By my count, over half a billion records of personal information have been exposed or mishandled in the past eight years. And these are only from breaches where a record count has been publicly revealed.
That's more than the population of the European Union, and more than the number of people living in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and all of Central America and the Caribbean combined. My count of 530 million is more than double the 244 million records cited on Privacyrights.org. So how did I arrive at that figure?
There are a number of Web sites where you can find information about data breaches, including Computerworld's privacy page, Attrition.org, the Identity Theft Resource Center, blogs, government agencies and privacy newsletters such as the International Association of Privacy Professionals' "Daily Dashboard". For my summer project this year, I tabulated the data from all of these sources. I added them to files I'd been keeping since 2000, which included data on breaches stretching back to 1995. An intern, Emily Prather, Googled the Fortune 500 companies for news of breaches that didn't make these lists. Add to these several dozen notification letters received by friends and family, and we tallied about 1,500 breaches.
