Data over the web

There is wide range of issues in making data available over the web, but most of the issues related to making data available over the web revolve around the issues of security of personal information and privacy. We’ve all read about the incident when personal or private data was accidentally made available on the web and personal information, social security numbers, credit card numbers of thousands of people were available to anyone for download. Here http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/secu/article.php/3347761 is an article about Barnes & Noble exposing customer data due to design flaw in their web ordering software.

Then there is an issue of identity theft, when hackers hack into computers of big corporations and steal user data which is then sold on the black market. Thieves are able to obtain loans and credit cards by using stolen information.

http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ChronDataBreaches.htm#CP page has comprehensive list of all data breaches in the US starting from January 10^th 2005 till now. According to this page, total number of records containing sensitive personal information involved in security breaches in the U.S. since January 2005 is 262,442,156

The most amazing data breach was when hackers established accounts on ChoicePoint’s web site (a company which does background investigations and therefore has access to personal information). This ID thieves. Stole over 163,000 records from the ChoicePoint’s database.