Four years ago, the EU’s Article 29 Data Protection Working Party stated that it “considered IP addresses as data relating to an identifiable person” — even though such nuggets of information can only discern a likely geographic location.  Indeed, firms like Google and MaxMind routinely use IP addresses to help identify where Internet users are [...]

Companies looking to purchase network security and privacy insurance for the first time only need to learn a quick three-step dance. First, know that there are around 25 viable liability markets so most any company should be able to quickly get a quote that will likely have solid coverages and be reasonably priced.  Although defendants [...]

While some data breach victims will eventually sustain an ID theft, it is generally acknowledged that the vast majority will not.  Accordingly, the direct damages sustained by ID theft victims are not very helpful in a class action — there are just not enough plaintiffs.  Over the years, plaintiffs’ class action counsel have spent many [...]

The new year appears to be continuing a trend begun in 2008 — ever increasing hype concerning the level of data security threats faced by public and private entities.  This hype is not just about increasing public breach disclosures (which have primarily been driven by the increase in breach notification laws) given it also manifests [...]

Although they have been out now for a few years, it is only recently that manufacturers have decided to mass market self-encrypting hard drives, i.e., drives that have integrated keys within their chip set.  According to standards experts quoted in a recent PC World article, in a few years, companies will be relying on self-encrypting drives “and you won’t [...]

The third annual Data Privacy Day is set for January 28, 2011.   Just in case you missed the first two, this is an annual “international celebration of the dignity of the individual expressed through personal information.”  According to the official website, the purpose of the day is to raise privacy awareness worldwide:   In this networked world, in which [...]

In a decision that might have significant ramifications in future discrimination and whistle-blower lawsuits, the New Jersey Supreme Court  ruled in Quinlan v. Curtiss-Wright Corp., No. A-51-09 (N.J. Sup. Ct. Dec. 2, 2010) that an employee who copied 1,800 of pages of documents that she came upon during the normal course of her work — many with [...]

Looking to beat the end of the year enforcement deadline, the Senate (on November 30, 2010) and the House (on December 7, 2010) have now both voted to pass a law that would limit the scope of the FTC’s Red Flags regulations.  Although the ABA lawsuit seeking to exempt lawyers from the scope of these regulations is on [...]

The Ponemon Institute’s latest report, “The Billion Dollar Laptop Study,” shows that 329 organizations surveyed lost more than 86,000 laptops over the course of a year.  Based on these findings and an earlier survey that put the average cost of lost laptop data at $49,246, the total cost amounts to more than $2.1 billion or $6.4 million per organization. [...]

As recently reported by InformationWeek, a study conducted by market researcher Ovum and the European Association for e-Identity and Security found that eight out of 10 CIOs believe using smartphones in the workplace increases their firm’s vulnerability to attack.  Although these CIOs rank data breaches as their top related security concern, half of the organizations acknowledge that they [...]