reality-based educator

From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) - The government agency charged with fighting identity theft said Thursday it had lost two government laptops containing sensitive personal data, the latest in a series of breaches encompassing millions of people.

The Federal Trade Commission said it would provide free credit monitoring for 110 people targeted for investigation whose names, addresses, Social Security numbers - and in some instances, financial account numbers - were taken from an FTC attorney's locked car.

The car theft occurred about 10 days ago and managers were immediately notified. Many of the people whose data were compromised were being investigated for possible fraud and identity theft, said Joel Winston, associate director of the FTC's Division of Privacy and Identity Theft Protection.

I have an idea: How about we stop putting confidential personal data onto fucking laptops. Laptops get stolen. PCs in government agencies, banks, and credit card companies rarely get
stolen. The info can get hacked or stolen via the Net, but a good security system ought to be able to prevent this from happening too often. Therefore, confidential personal information on pcs good, confidential personal information on laptops bad.

And I don't want to hear that people have to take this info on the road with them. If they can't protect the info on the laptops, then they shouldn't be given the priviledge of taking it with them.

It's called being responsible.

It's late and I'm tired, so I'm sure I'm missing a very good reason why confidential information has to be put on laptops. But I'm sick of hearing stories about people's info being stolen because of negligence.