Fidelity National Information Services, a financial processing company, said Tuesday a worker at one of its subsidiaries stole 2.3 million consumer records containing credit card, bank account and other personal information.This is another one of those issues where I know a thing or two, as I work in IT with the federal government.
Here's the deal. You cannot stop the loss of personal data from a database. The comments thread of that post offered dozens of different ways that prevent the loss of things such as social security numbers, names, addresses, etc. Not a single one of those ideas will work.
Any IT guy worth his salt knows the obvious. When you have a bunch of data on a bunch of hard drives, accessed by a bunch of people, the data is going to be "lost". There is no way around that. It's like pouring a bunch of water into a cardboard box and expecting it not to leak.
What they should be addressing in Congress is not how to prevent data loss, but rather how to make it so that it's irrelevant. I don't have a bullet-proof solution yet, but there has to be a way so that it would make no difference if your personal data were publicly available.
If you want to become stinking rich, figure out the solution to that problem and get a patent on it if you can.
3 comments:
retinal scan? or 12pt fingerprint verification?
Problem with that is that a lot of credit card transactions are done electronically.. or over the phone.. basically remotely where those devices are not available.
You're basically suggesting some bio-metric identification, and I'm not quite sure how that would work.
You could do it, it would just be costly.
There are personal fingerprint devices that hook up to USB ports and interface with special software to determine identity. Currently these are 7 pt systems. And they arn't cheap. Not as expensive as one might think, but still not cheap.
I think the real deal here would be to invent a way for biometric identification devices to be cost effective enought for personal use. That, and allow them to do a 12 pt reading without taking an hour pressing your finger on the keypad.
However, as always, since they use translation software, they would be suseptible to hacking.
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