Routine Personal Information Posting in the U.S. State Government Agencies

Now Available:

Featured Resources:

NBC news ran a story about how many state government agencies post sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) on their websites. In this case an Ohio county court "routinely posted traffic tickets and other public records on its Web site."

Many state government agencies post personally identifiable information (PII) on their sites. Routinely.

All organizations, including governmental agencies, must be held to the same standard of protecting PII in order to have any headway in helping to reduce identity theft, fraud, related cybercrimes, and even physical crimes. Too many people have been victims as a result of irresponsible posting of PII that criminals, stalkers, psychopaths and murderers subsequently used for their horrendous deeds. Remember the incident in 1989 of Rebecca Schaeffer and how she was murdered by a stalker who easily obtained her home address from the California DMV. Laws protecting DMV data have been passed as a result, most notably the Driver's Privacy Protectoin Act of 1994. However, comprehensive privacy protections are needed addressing all types of organizations that collect, store, and handle in any other way PII.

Isn't it ironic that if private organizations did these routine data posting practices they would be have to follow the breach notice laws passed at the state level, but posting PII is mandated in so many state government offices? To slightly paraphrase what they would say in Oz, this certainly is a breach of a different color.

Categories

Rebecca Herold's Bio:

Rebecca Herold,CISSP, CIPP, CISM, CISA, FLMI, has been providing information security, privacy and regulatory assistance and services to organizations from a wide range of industries for over 18 years. Rebecca was instrumental in building the information security and privacy program while at Principal Financial Group, which was awarded the CSI Information Security Program of the Year Award in 1998. IT Security ranked Rebecca as one of the top 59 IT security influencers, and Computerworld put Rebecca their list of the 25 top privacy experts and on their list of the 9 best privacy consulting firms. Rebecca has been CPO for two consulting organizations, and has had her own information privacy, security and compliance business since 2004. Rebecca has written chapters for several books, dozens of articles, and has been writing a monthly privacy column for the CSI Alert newsletter since the beginning of 2001, and is working on her 11th book. Some of her other books include The Privacy Papers, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program, The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter (Realtime Publishers), The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL (Realtime Publishers), and The Practical Guide to HIPAA Privacy and Security Compliance. In addition, Rebecca is the leader of The Realtime IT Compliance Community where she posts to her IT Compliance weblog. You can contact Rebecca at: rebecca_herold@realtimepublishers.net.

Now Available:

Featured Resources:

Realtime Communities

Newsletter

Monthly Archives

RSS

Ask the Expert