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

forbes.com

31–40 of 163 posts

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

#31
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…

AWS has Config rules and Macie to help avoid these kinds of data breaches so basically the few excuses left for these now literally come down to variations of laziness or lack of willingness to fund usage of these services (that are really cheap compared to the cost of remediation a data breach disclosure to the public).

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

#33
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The horse is out of the barn. We need to make the data itself worthless. There's no getting it back.

How would we go about making the data worthless?

One, rather drastic, approach would be making the data of everybody freely available to everybody, think post-privacy society.

At least that's how I originally imagined this Internet thing to play out as, too bad it took the exact opposite direction.

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

#34

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…

FYI, 120 million American households is only a few percent off from the being all American households. That part at least is fair.

Huh, apparently there are about 125 million households in the US. I didn't realize it was that close.

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

#36

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…

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.

The royalty is free access to Facebook, instagram, [insert free web service name here]

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

#38

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…

> If you have a breach of data, your tax goes up for a period of 10 years.

You do know it is impossible thwart all data breaches right? You can have the most sophisticated security system created and Zero-day attacks are still bound to occur. Data breaches occur without the companies themselves even knowing they took place... Geniuses are on the offensive side, if they want in, they will get in. No company in the right mind would agree to pay a tax when the inevitable happens. Just my 0.02

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

#39

All personal information sharing should now be purely digital and encryption-keyed. We have all of the protocols, interconnected networking and ubiquitous computing necessary to make it practical. The only “data” any organization should receive is an encrypted blob that is constructed using the key of the person who owns the data and the key of the entity that was directly given the data. Furthermore, the encoded blo…

A big problem with this is that a lot of data about you isn't owned by you. The fact that you took out credit card X on Y date and have paid the balance on time since then is owned by the credit card company you do business with (well, it belongs to you too, but businesses are more willing to trust Chase than you). This information has real business value from being a leading indicator and costly signal of your future propensity to repay debts.

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

#40

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…

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.

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