Stolen data. Yours?
The recent news about a lost harddrive for CIBC’s brokerage company and the theft of data from TJX’s computer systems (winners/homesense) just shows a glimpse of what is going to be common place crime in the future. Most likely it is already a lot more common place than we think, considering that there are probably many other companies that have experienced data theft but have decided not to talk about it.
So do we really trust companies to keep our data safe, when they say to us: “We are not telling you how we are storing the data and what we are doing with it, just trust us: We keep it safe.” Security by obscurity is not a real way to ensure privacy.
Be selective about what data you share with home – why does Blinds To Go for example need your phone number in order to provide you a quote? And maybe we should even go back to using more cash to pay for what we buy – it also makes our purchases less trackable.