Client Info In Jeopardy? The Secret Could Be Forced Out

Most businesses outside of California are under no legal obligation to alert their customers if a database has been broken into (which can compromise personal data such as credit card numbers or bank accounts). But that could soon be changing.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has introduced the “Notification of Risk to Personal Data Act” to require businesses to notify individuals when there is evidence that a hacker, other criminal, or even an employee, broke into an entity’s database. So far, California is the only state that has such legislation.

“I strongly believe individuals have a right to be notified when their most sensitive information is compromised — because it is truly their information. This is both a matter of principle and a practical measure to curb identity theft,” says Feinstein in a post on her Web site.

According to the act, businesses that fail to comply after a breach will be fined.

So, building service contractors who receive credit card payments from clients would be forced to alert all affected customers of the security breach.

The new act should entice BSCs to ensure that sensitive customer data is well protected from hackers and other threats.


Does your business have a lot of unused furniture sitting around from a recent office refurnishing? What about old computers left over from a recent technical upgrade? Or maybe, you just moved into a larger building and are in need of extra desks or file cabinets.

People in need can sign up on the Freecycle.org message boards to find items that meet their needs; or, they can donate items to meet the needs of others.

The boards are divided by cities or counties and each area contains individual members. Freecycle.org currently has groups in more than 350 cities and 56,000 members.

The only rules of the organization are that everything must be free and that everyone’s first post be an offer rather than a wanted post.


Watching The Web
With Google’s Gmail offering one gigabyte of e-mail storage free (see TechTalk in May, obviously it wouldn’t be long until the competition followed suit. Now, building service contractors without a company domain-name e-mail account who use services such as Microsoft’s Hotmail, Rediff’s Rediffmail, or Yahoo! won’t have to switch e-mail providers to gain greater free storage.

Rediffmail offers the same one gigabyte as Gmail, up from its previous offer of five megabytes. Yahoo! has increased from four to 100 megabytes and Hotmail from two to 250 megabytes. Hotmail and Yahoo! also offers the ability to send attachments up to 10 megabytes in size.

Unlike Gmail, these services won’t insert advertisements into the e-mail based on its content.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is considering introducing 10 new Internet domains by the end of September. Unlike the generic .com or .net, these new domain IDs will be designed with specific intentions in mind.

Some of the proposed domains will be helpful to businesses. For example, the proposed .mail would be for non-spam e-mail senders only, ensuring important messages won’t get caught in spam filters.

Instead of posting job listings on a company Web site such as www.bsccompany.com/jobs, businesses could list them directly on a .jobs domain. The result would be www.bsccompany.jobs, giving those looking for new employment a more direct route to find your job offers.

For sales representatives out in the field armed only with a cell phone, a .mobi domain would be for Web sites with content designed to fit on small screens.




POSTED ON: 8/1/2004