Are You Sure You Had a Privacy Incident?

Stories about security breach are in the news. Some stories concern "leaks" of companies' sensitive information, the urgency of finding the source (or sources), and the efforts to interdict them or "plug" the leaks. But most published stories involve the loss of control over personal information stored in electronically saved records; they therefore often include whether there has been a privacy compromise. Whether its lost laptops, misplaced backup tapes, or data posted to Web sites, data spills have become a fact of life for all of us. In the US, state governments and federal agencies have responded with a series of notification rules, which require companies to inform the affected individuals after security incidents