Information technology chiefs across corporate America are circling the wagons over leakage of personal information related to employees and customers.
“Businesses are feeling squeezed,” said Steven Adler, a data governance guru with IBM Corp. “California now requires that businesses inform customers when there’s a data theft, and other states are passing laws.”
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Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed a number of bills Thursday that require businesses to notify consumers if their confidential computerized records are stolen, lost or otherwise breached.
The legislation, only the second in the nation, is modeled on the California law that has been widely credited for exposing how extensive computer data breaches have become.
The problem, Adler said, is there is no readily apparent solution to the complex problem of protecting privacy while sharing data. “We’ve spent the last decade creating a world that encourages free information flow,” said Adler, “but now the pendulum is swinging back the other way.”
Adler was in Chicago recently for a meeting among IBM and several of its large customers and business associates to discuss corporate data governance. Since last year IBM has been holding similar meetings around the country with an eye toward defining and solving the problem.
“People take this very seriously,” said David Straus, senior vice president at Corticon Technologies Inc. of San Mateo, Calif. “Competitors are sitting down in the same room to talk about it, seeking a common strategy.”
Technology is at the heart of the current crisis in information control, and solving the problem will require more technology, not less, he said.
“The number of transactions is so huge, that only through technology can they be controlled,” Straus said.
It once was possible to protect a firm’s assets by putting them in a locked vault, said Bill Haase, a senior vice president with Fidelis Security Systems of Bethesda, Md., but that’s not the case now.
“The money’s no longer in the vault. It’s in the database,” he said.
Wi-Fi world: The popularity of Wi-Fi connections to the Internet keeps growing, said Joe Sims, general manager for hot-spot service at T-Mobile USA, the cell phone carrier.
In the last three months nearly 3 million customers accessed T-Mobile’s Wi-Fi connections. Their average session time in May was slightly more than an hour. That’s up from 45 minutes in 2004 and 23 minutes in 2003.
The volume of traffic is rising. In December T-Mobile moved about 10 terabytes across its networks, Sims said. In May, it moved 17.5 terabytes.
Phaseout coming? Most households in the United States have two or three TV sets, but very few are ever tuned in to watch programs beamed over the air, a study by the Consumer Electronics Association has found.
Of almost 110 million households with TV sets, nearly 66 million are connected to cable systems, 26 million are hooked to satellite receivers and almost 3 million get both cable and satellite. About 2 million households have TV sets but don’t use them to watch programs, the survey found.
“More than 88 percent of today’s TVs are connected to cable or satellite service or are used to play video games, watch prerecorded content or some other non-broadcast TV function,” said Gary Shapiro, chief of the association.
The trade group made its survey to support a move in Congress to set a specific date to phase out over-the-air analog TV in a transition to all-digital TV. The cut-off of traditional analog signals would affect some 33.6 million of the 285 million TV sets now in use in the U.S., Shapiro said.
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