Personally identifiable information on about 68,000 members of CalOptima, a Medicaid managed care plan serving Orange County, Calif., may have been compromised after several CDs containing the information went missing earlier this month.
The unencrypted data on the CDs includes member names, home addresses, dates of birth, medical procedure codes, diagnosis codes and member ID numbers, and an unspecified number of Social Security numbers.
Is privacy still possible? For a lot of people, the answer is no, as companies collect personal data in ever-increasing volumes. Take a site like NextMark.com.
THE nation's controversial DNA database is two-thirds full just six months after it was finally connected to all police jurisdictions, and will require a substantial technology upgrade, CrimTrac says.
A strategic review found the National Criminal Investigation DNA Database, used by police to cross-check the genetic signatures of known criminals or suspects, already holds almost 500,000 profiles while the system has a functional capacity of around 750,000.
Being an American, as I am, entails a truly awesome level of responsibility, not even counting any global-policeman, Pax Americana nonsense, which nobody here takes seriously anyway, except for select government officials and people who make a point of working the American flag into their daily wardrobes.
Facebook definitely allows you to easily communicate with others, but if you’re not careful, certain information you would like to remain private can be exposed. Here we take a look at locking down your profile, and how to avoid other annoyances.
Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with friends, family and other contacts online. It’s also a great place to spread personal information, pictures, and other data to everyone if you don’t use the proper settings. The first thing you want to do is change default settings under the Privacy Settings.
There are certain things you do not want to share with strangers. In my case it was a stream of highly personal text messages from my husband, sent during the early days of our relationship. Etched on my phone's SIM card - but invisible on my current handset and thus forgotten - here they now are, displayed in all their brazen glory on a stranger's computer screen.
The owners of online networking sites generally have access to the personal information of the users on their sites, which can lead to privacy problems.
To deal with it Landon Cox, a Duke University assistant professor of computer science, has been funded by the National Science Foundation. The professor emphasised on the lack of power in the hands of netizens who use social networking sites like Facebook to communicate and share data.
Virginia, still managing its way through a troubled outsourcing deal, has a second IT mess on its hands. The state revealed that an unencrypted flash drive containing personal information on more than 100,000 adult education students has been lost.
The flash drive, which was lost after being given to a researcher at Virginia Tech for use in federally mandated research, contained the names, social security numbers, and birth dates of students who used adult education and literacy programs, as well as those who earned a high school equivalency certificate.
The National Institute of Educational Testing Service (NIETS) has learned that information about some 1,000 students were stolen by hackers in their coordinated Denial of Service attacks against the NIETS website.
Deputy Education Minister Chaiwuti Bannawat said Saturday that the initial IT probe found that the hackers accessed the NIETS system via student applicants' information to launch the attacks and so far some 1,000 students were found to have their information stolen.
A sensitive e-mail mistakenly sent by a bank to a Gmail address that prompted a court to order Google to deactivate the account was not viewed by the recipient and has been deleted, the bank said on Tuesday.
The e-mail, sent by an employee of Jackson, Wyoming-based Rocky Mountain Bank on August 12, contained names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and loan information of more than 1,300 bank customers.
