Privacy Lessons Learned: They Can't Steal What You Don't Have

It is an unfortunate truism that we can often learn from the misfortunes of others, and this is certainly true with respect to privacy breaches.

Beyond the need for increasingly robust security safeguards, recent media coverage of a number of high-profile privacy breaches offer another ready lesson for corporations that collect and store personal information: information that is not retained cannot be the subject of a data breach.

In one recent breach, the victim of a possible data theft noted that records provided to a vendor were apparently not destroyed, although the outsourcing organization believed that they had been. It was these records that were the subject of data theft by an unknown hacker. In another recent breach case, information was stolen from an internal database of customer information that was no longer being used.