NY Bank ‘loses’ 4.5M unencrypted customer records by ZDNet‘s Michael Krigsman — In yet another unbelievable story of data irresponsibility, the Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon lost two sets of unencrypted backup tapes containing private data belonging to 4.5 million individuals. Third-party vendors misplaced the tapes during transport to off-site locations.
This is ridiculous. In this day and age, where identity theft is commonplace, encryption should be standard practice. Safeguarding customer information should be priority #1. I’m all for limited government, but this is one place the government should get involved and make it mandatory, for any company that stores personal information, to make the data encrypted. The software and technology exists to do encryption/decryption in real-time, on-the-fly. Of course, for huge multi-national corporations, they say your privacy is important to them, but not as important as the bottom-line.