Information Security

There has been a rise in identity theft which concerns me on how secure is my information? How safe are we living in this information age? This is a serious issue that faces the information community. One of the biggest cases of credit card theft is the one that happened at TJMaxx where credit card information of 45 million customers were stolen to buy goods worth $256 million. This case had huge implications for the customers and the organization. Would you still shop in TJMaxx knowing that your information can be compromised? So there is also brand reputation at stake when an incident of this sort occurs. This incident has actually made organizations and people realize how serious this kind of theft is and many companies have strengthened their security and adopted stricter security measures to thwart the dangers of a breach. But with more and more information; and new technologies to transfer this information it is always possible to find new loopholes to attack a system and this goes back to my initial question on how secure we actually are? How secure is our identity and our information which can be traced to find out every possible details of us as a person.

It is now a day’s pretty common to keep track of costumer’s buying habits to understand their buying pattern. I personally wouldn’t want some stranger trying to make a prediction of what I want based on some previous data. It makes me uncomfortable thinking that a list of everything I buy might be stored in some database to understand me, what I like, not like and who I am as a person. As a customer I would want to know what is done with my information, where it is stored and how secure it is. Isn’t it unethical to use someone’s personal information without their knowledge? My opinion is that it is the responsibility of every business to tell its customers about what sort of their personal information is stored and how it is being used if at all for any analysis purposes. Being upfront and telling the customers would make you seem more genuine and as someone who cares about their customers’ information and its safety.

First and foremost, we need to have policies and laws in place to set a clear definition of what is acceptable and what is not in the online world. There are many policy agreements that a user needs to consent to before proceeding to a web page, but how many of us actually read the agreement? So a genuine effort must be made to educate the public about information privacy and security. There must be a standardized law to deal with situations like cyber crime and identity theft. Each state in US has its own laws to deal with privacy rights and data breach issues which then becomes a quagmire of various laws. There should be a common federal law for the country to deal with these types of situations. In order to have a safer community in the online world, it is highly crucial that these facts are set straight before we hit rock bottom.