Are We Ready For a True Data Disaster? 113
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions how long we can go before a truly catastrophic data disaster strikes. 'The lure of potential profits in the information economy, combined with the apparent ease with which data can be gathered and a lack of regulation, creates a climate of recklessness in which a "data spill" of the scale of the Deepwater Horizon incident seems not just likely, but inevitable.' Witness Google mistakenly emailing potentially sensitive business data to customers of its Local Business Center service, or the 1.5 million Facebook accounts and passwords recently offered up on an underground hacking forum. 'These incidents seem relatively minor, but as companies gather ever more individually identifiable data and cross-reference these databases in new and more innovative ways, the potential for a major catastrophe grows.'"
The State of Data is Not Good (Score:4, Interesting)
There are a few facets to the issue - let me try to dissect them:
Just like in statistics -- corporations are not looking for a particular person, but they are trying to aggregate it all and derive a trend or more accurately a statistical model. And just like in statistics -- the outliers will stand out.
Until criminals discover databases. (Score:3, Interesting)
-and-
Now imagine a criminal organization that is interested in collecting that information and sorting it into personal profiles. Start with a database of social security numbers.
Now add enough detail to be able to get loans or credentials in the names of those people (with the aforementioned social security numbers).
It wouldn't take much processing power or storage.
The problem seems to me to be... (Score:1, Interesting)
.. that we don't know what data we do have, what data we should have, why we have it, what we want to do with it. Data itself is the problem we are collecting collating, storing this crap, if I collect and store enough tires they will eventually catch fire and burn things and poison people, I done know how you really go about estimating the cost of what has already happened, which seems to me to be disastrous, but things like 10 million CC number released, or 10's 100's of millions of Social security/bank account numbers (or sub. for which country you want) released are causing giant disruptions to people individual lives and costing who knows how much in fixing, just as a small example, I had a friend that had his credit score wreaked because of an unsolicited CC that was never activated but charged a something like $2 fee (which it was not supposed to), which was of course never paid since he was completely unaware of it and more than a year, many e-mails and phone calls and lots of straight out frustration an misery it was finally fixed what is that 50? 100? hrs of peoples wasted time and that was a simple billing error never mind a full on identity theft or any number of thousands of other problems erroneous or stolen/posted in to open information can cause to individuals (primarily the ones who pay the cost of these problems) if you want to count it in purely dollar cost my bet is we have already had hundreds of disasters that equal or exceed DWH, certainly on a personal level the level of disaster about to be experienced by the residence of the coast has been exceeded many many times world wide, but it is more diffuse and so less noticeable. I can't list all of the potential problems and people who should be here don't need me to tell them.
Data + Human = TONFO It's the only way to be sure
Sorry wait I'm not a web 2.0 weeny "I say we take off and nuke it from orbit,... its the only way to be sure.."
Besides I didn't RTFA
Re:Not Obeying The Law prevents data disaster (Score:3, Interesting)
The independents are hard to find.
By design even. Distribution is the primary thing that keeps the cartel's thumb pressed down upon artists. Pandora helps a lot, but lately they seem to be fallible even. I can't seem to get them to stop play Coldplay for example. I finally thought I voted down every Coldplay song in the collection, and then they started springing LIVE versions on me. I kind of thing they're getting paid to push it at this point.