Story: Should companies care about privacy breaches?

Posted by: Unlike U. Notta-Troll (Sunday 2 July 2006, 6:33 PM)

What kind of stupid question is "Should companies care about privacy breaches?" Of course they should, just like factories in the 1890s should have cared about 10-year old workers losing arms in machines.

The problem is that neither laws nor insurance companies financially compel them to do so. As long as we lack any meaningful privacy laws and politicians keep getting paid to keep it that way, the situation is unlikely to change.

And indeed, encryption is not a 100% solution. You can use a trivial algorithm or use a good algorithm badly. However, using even something like PGP to encrypt the data raises the bar high enough as to make cracking it technically infeasible for all but the most committed criminals, you know, the ones with PhDs in Mathematics and an army of Crays at their disposal. Certainly it would make it harder than many companies' current state of the art, which is to leave the data in the cleartext on a laptop computer in a car.