Why a security crackdown on our personal data is needed

THE DATA Protection Commissioner’s 2009 interim annual report, released last week, reveals that personal data security breaches – the loss of sensitive personal information by companies or organisations – were up almost 50 per cent on 2008.

Surely this is overwhelming proof (if any more were needed after the appalling tales of data loss by Government departments, semi-State agencies and a variety of companies) that Ireland needs to legislate for mandatory disclosure of data breaches.Such laws are increasingly the norm across the world. In the US almost every state has such a law. There is formidable evidence that it was only legislation of this sort, introduced at the start of the decade in California, which led to the realisation that some massive breaches were happening at all.

It was only when Californians had to be notified of such losses that the national scale of some of these breaches was realised: in some cases, tens of millions of records were accidentally lost or stolen in single incidents. Read More

Courtesy: Irish Times