Friday, August 05, 2005

San Diego County data breach yields little public outcry

I recently blogged about an incident that exposed sensitive personal information of San Diego county employees (The Canadian Privacy Law Blog: Incident: Computer breach leaves San Diego county personnel vulnerable).

Today, the North County Times is reporting that only one affected person showed up at a board meeting to discuss the incident, suggesting that very few of the affected employees are concerned about the leak:

County data breach yields little public outcry North County Times - North San Diego and Southwest Riverside County News:

"SAN DIEGO ---- If 32,000 current and retired San Diego County employees are worried about a computer breach that exposed their Social Security numbers and may have put them in financial danger, it didn't show Thursday.

Just one county employee, Scott Gilmore, showed up to question the potential security breach when members of the San Diego County Employees Retirement Association board met for the first time since disclosing the computer break-in last Friday. Gilmore, who works in the county's Department of Planning and Land Use, said the agency downplayed the bad news, and that county employees did not appear to be taking the break-in seriously.

He said he had personally surveyed 25 to 30 of his co-workers to find out what actions they had taken in the wake of the computer breach that exposed names, Social Security numbers, home addresses, dates of birth and the departments that people worked in.

'Not one of them, zero, had requested fraud alerts,' Gilmore said. 'I realized then that people just had no clue.'"..."

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