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120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

forbes.com

111–120 of 163 posts

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#112

Personal data right now is considered an asset. It needs to be seen as a liability. Maybe the solution is a data tax. You pay a set amount every year for every piece of personal data you have. If you buy personal data from another company, you still have to pay the tax for the data you acquired. If you have a breach of data, your tax goes up for a period of 10 years. In addition, every piece of personal data needs to…

I would love to introduce you to the GDPR. It does almost all of what you propose, and it goes into effect in May in Europe.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#113

The linked article is not very good imo. It goes into almost no detail, despite including two directly contradictory statements: "Yet another cloud storage misconfiguration has exposed personally identifiable information (PII)" and "the data in question contained no names of any individuals or any other personal identifying information" Can we change this to link to the Forbes article referenced in the linked one? It…

The Forbes article also points out that the DB is now secured. I have 2 take-aways: 1. This isn't an announcement that our details have been leaked, so much as a reminder that our details are now and will perpetually be leaked, in one form or another by an externalized party. 2. Databases mapping all American households exist.

I worked at Experian and had access to ConsumerView by way of any number of crazy integration schemes that were/are perpetually making a mockery of security protocols in order to meet deadlines and please clients. Pretty much anyone with network access could download a copy and walk out with it.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my data, why should they pay a tax to the government for it? How about a data royalty. You use my data, you must pay me a royalty.

"It's my data" - this is absurd. Observations I make are mine, if I observe you it's my observation. I can tell stories about my observations, but if I make public statements about you that are false, that's a tort.

If that were true, your "observations" of a movie would give you the right to reproduce it, and that's not the case today.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of a data tax, I like the idea of mandatory data insurance, with payouts to users whose data is leaked/stolen. If your company has shitty security, or a history of leaks, your data insurance provider will charge out the ass. The financial math has to clearly be on the side of it being more profitable to practice proactive security.

> I like the idea of mandatory data insurance Why not just liability for lost data? Companies could then choose to hold the risk themselves or field it out to insurers.

This exists and companies purchase it, ex: https://www.thehartford.com/data-breach-insurance

Risks (all kinds, not just technical) can be accepted, ignored, transferred and mitigated so it is important to have this option.

Its still not a great option for anyone involved as it is hard to price and last I checked had pretty low ceiling on payouts.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's my data" - this is absurd. Observations I make are mine, if I observe you it's my observation. I can tell stories about my observations, but if I make public statements about you that are false, that's a tort.

If that were true, your "observations" of a movie would give you the right to reproduce it, and that's not the case today.

Generally facts can't be copyrighted. I think a lawsuit about copying the phone book contents is usually given as the basis for that legal precedent.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were true, your "observations" of a movie would give you the right to reproduce it, and that's not the case today.

Generally facts can't be copyrighted. I think a lawsuit about copying the phone book contents is usually given as the basis for that legal precedent.

Observations of behaviour are not normally isolated to facts, they're integrated to create models of behaviour.

I was specifically giving an example of why your observations don't automatically mean you have ownership today. I'm personally in favour of laws that ensure such observations are more explicitly owned by the observee in corporate scenarios.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#118
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my data, why should they pay a tax to the government for it? How about a data royalty. You use my data, you must pay me a royalty.

Sounds like a blockchain solution in the making... /s

Haven't you heard... It's all about blockchains of blockchains these days. Gives you ln(n) time instead of n. There is also interesting work in leader follower blockchains.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#120
post #13

>At issue is once again an Amazon Web Services S3 cloud storage bucket that was misconfigured and inadvertently left open to the public internet, where anyone with a connection online could have found it. I use S3 and I have noticed that by default it's locked down and secure and in order for it to be open you have to open it for the public. Maybe AWS could improve the way it can secure the S3 buckets by making it ea…

I have never used it so I don't know how clear is the UI but if we keep seeing people doing the same mistake (leaving an AWS repository open leading to a major data leak) then perhaps there is something wrong about the UI, and how easy AWS makes it to access a private repository.

Also what I don't understand is do AWS storage buckets have directory listing enabled by default? How can a third party guess the URL, unless it is something obvious like /backup.csv.

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