1-Find an example of a privacy breach that was
reported in the Australian or international news in the last 6 months. What
were the consequences? i.e. legal, political, financial, personal etc. What
action was taken in response to the privacy breach?
·
Case Outline:
The Target Corporation is an American retailing company, founded in 1902
and headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is the second-largest discount
retailer in the United States, Wal-Mart being the largest.
On
Dec 19, 2013 the Target company released the
statement confirming a data privacy breach, saying that 40 million credit
and debit card accounts may have been impacted between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15,
2013.As per matter of fact
On
Jan 10, 2014 Target said that the thieves who stole massive amounts of credit and
debit card information during the holiday season also swept up names, addresses and phone numbers of 70 million
customers, information that could put victims at greater risk for identity
theft.
As per matter of fact the breach
at Target Corp. that exposed credit card and personal data on
more than 110 million consumers appears to have begun with a malware-laced
email phishing attack sent to employees at an HVAC firm that did business with
the nationwide retailer, according to sources close to the investigation.
KrebsOnSecurity reported that investigators believe the source
of the Target intrusion traces back to network credentials that Target had
issued to Fazio Mechanical, a heating, air conditioning and
refrigeration firm in Sharpsburg, Pa. Multiple sources close to the
investigation now tell this reporter that those credentials were stolen in an
email malware attack at Fazio that began at least two months before thieves
started stealing card data from thousands of Target cash registers.
According to business week article issued on 13th March 2014,the
fact was ,
In the days prior to Thanksgiving 2013, someone installed
malware in Target’s (TGT) security and payments system designed to steal every
credit card used at the company’s 1,797 U.S. stores. At the critical
moment—when the Christmas gifts had been scanned and bagged and the cashier
asked for a swipe—the malware would step in, capture the shopper’s credit card
number, and store it on a Target server commandeered by the hackers.
·
Consequences:
1. As a consequence the Target Company had to face legal charge. More
than 90 lawsuits have been filed against Target by customers and banks for
negligence and compensatory damages that’s on top of other costs, which
analysts estimate could run into the billions.
2. Target’s profit for the holiday shopping period fell 46 percent
from the same quarter the year before; the number of transactions suffered its
biggest decline since the retailer began reporting the statistic in 2008.
3. Target company’ share prices started to fall considerably
4. In Cowen & Co.’s Consumer Tracking Survey, conducted
quarterly and for the first time since Target’s security breach news in
mid-December, it found “meaningful decreases” in year-over-year customer
satisfaction with both the total shopping experience and customer service in
March. Satisfaction with the overall shopping experience at Target was down
almost 2 percentage points in March, with declines “most acute” among
middle-and-upper-income shoppers, analyst Faye Landes said, adding the
higher-income shoppers are “key cohorts for Target”
·
Actions taken in response Privacy breach
As soon as the
incident was made known to target they made it publicly announced. Further Target Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer Gregg
Steinhafel issued an e-mailed statement in which he told actions taken in detail;
he said “Target was certified as meeting the standard for the payment card
industry (PCI) in September 2013. Nonetheless, we suffered a data breach. As a
result, we are conducting an end-to-end review of our people, processes and
technology to understand our opportunities to improve data security and are
committed to learning from this experience. While we are still in the midst of
an ongoing investigation, we have already taken significant steps, including
beginning the overhaul of our information security structure and the
acceleration of our transition to chip-enabled cards. However, as the
investigation is not complete, we don’t believe it’s constructive to engage in
speculation without the benefit of the final analysis.”
Target spokeswoman Sarah VanNevel said the company is “taking
extra steps” to win back shoppers
2-Case Study: ‘Dark Scenario’ based
on the fictitious Data Mining Corporation (DMC)
Ø
What AMI technologies are identified in
the case?
Ambient Intelligence has been defined as the field
to study and create embodiments for smart environments that not only react
to human events through sensing, interpretation and service
provision, but also learn and adapt their operation and services to the users
over time. These relates to the technologies that are sensitive
and responsive to the presence of humans. For example, sensors that switches on
lights when a human enters a room.in the case of Data Mining Corporation a lot
of ambient technologies are identified which are listed below,
ü Location implants
ü Sensor networks in home and in cars
ü Surveillance system
ü High capacity optical storage
devices
ü Backup devices
ü Mobile phones
ü Security system
Ø
What drives DMC’s officers to take the
actions they took?
DMC’s officers decided and got instructions from their management to
hide information of data theft from police and from their clients. Although
this action was not ethical but it would have been very damaging for the company.
Major fears which drove them to take this action involved,
ü Fear of losing trust of the clients
and giving them image that profiles of company’s own employees is not reliable
ü Fear of bad publicity
ü Fear of decline in share prices
ü Fear of damage to plans of TSE
listing
ü If clients of the company would have
come to know that their data is not secure then they would have withdrawn their
business and DMC and it would have caused disastrous for the company.
Ø
DMC is the clear market leader in
the aggregation of AMI data. Are there any comparisons you can make
to technology companies today?
Yahoo and Google are not specifically
engaged in aggregation of AMI data but they have vast amount of data on
its users profiles, it can use this data in tracing the trends and behaviour of
its users in sending them relevant utilities information which can best help
their users to cater their needs according to their likes and moods. For
example Google can track the information about its users from its different
utilities it provides like
·
Google Plus ,
·
Google Talk,
·
Google Map ,
·
Search pattern on Google Search
·
Google News , type of articles
selected,
, and can then target tem to send advertisements of games or shopping
or their new features as per the taste of the consumer. The same fact that Google
hold enormous amount of data about their users was also explained by the
Marrisa Mayer in her interview we read in doing last topic’s blogs.
Ø
How realistic is the description of
governments using the technology and prohibiting immigration from
states with no AMI data aggregation information?
In my view, in a way Government use of technology and
prohibiting immigration from states with no AMI data aggregation information
system is realistic as the AMI data profile of the people coming into states
helps Government find out that the people coming to STATES are not threat to
the security of the country. Government need to know the plans of the people
what they intend to do in states what is their background, what are their aims,
and most importantly if they are threat in any way to the country.
On the other hand this may also be regarded as the
discrimination as prohibiting someone from entering states only on the reason
that their data history is not available on AMI data network seems illogical
and it hampers self-esteem of the
individuals.
Ø
What would be the impact of this digital
divide?
A digital divide is
an economic inequality between groups, broadly construed, in terms of
access to, use of, or knowledge of information and communication
technologies (ICT). The divide within countries, (such as the digital divide in the United States)
may refer to inequalities between individuals, households, businesses, and
geographic areas at different socioeconomic and other demographic levels, while
the divide between countries is referred to as the global digital divide, which designates nations as the units
of analysis and examines the gap between developing and developed countries on
an international scale.
This digital divide causes a significant
problem in many struggling parts of the world. The parts of the world
that have a predominant amount of internet access is the western world, the
United States, Europe and Northern Asia, where as access is more restricted in
the poorer less developed parts of the world such as Africa, India and southern
parts of Asia. These poorer nations are unable to afford the initial startup
cost to be able to invest into technology to allow their nation to be able to
have and maintain internet access. This puts these countries at a
competitive and economic disadvantage. This is due to the fact that it
impacts on society at many levels. By a country not having internet
access, it means that schools are unable to teach IT skills and take advantage
of the vast amount of information available on the web. With
a lack of IT skills people from these countries are unable to compete at an
international level.
In contrast the richer
countries benefit from more highly trained people who will in turn enable
higher economic growth. In urban areas more people seem to
have internet access as opposed to rural areas causing yet another divide.
Also countries that don’t have internet access are unable to carry out
e-commerce and e-business putting their companies at a significant disadvantage
with in the global market.
Ø
List some of the ‘unintended
consequences’ described in the case.
Some of the unintended consequences
involved, identity theft cases, people’s credit cards showed unauthorized uses
as their bills showed the things they haven’t bought, a lot of companies and
people got blackmailed with threats of releasing information. Consequently DMC
had to face the legal charges due to negligence in securing the data and hiding
the fact of data theft, their share prices started to fall and their clients
lost confidence in them.
REFERENCES:
