The red herring of data protection | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

by Eric Norlin
"Set aside for a moment the debate about why, all of a sudden, we're hearing about all of this. Instead, focus on the reasons behind the data loss: physical tapes lost in transit, hackers, malicious insiders, bad network security practices. Notice that the reasons behind the loss are all over the map. We're told the solution is better network security, better encryption, better corporate safeguards, and better 'data protection.' Of course, all of these 'solutions' are a bit specious, as they're always accompanied by the corporate lawyer caveat, 'we cannot guarantee that this won't happen again.'

All of this will ultimately result in some bloated piece of federal legislation around 'data privacy and protection' that will impose new restrictions on corporate security practices and result in a wave of new spending on IT solutions to help solve that problem. But will we have solved it, really? "

I don't think so.

In the end, this "data loss" problem isn't really about data loss, data protection or data safeguarding at all. That, my friends, is a red herring. The real question to be asked is: Why do all of these corporations need to store all of this personal data in the first place? Why does my credit card company need to store my social security number? Why does Amazon need to store my credit card number? Why shouldn't every company store only what I tell them they can store? And why shouldn't the data that they store be as little as they possibly need to conduct business?

Assuming that there's even a smidgen of validity in my line of questioning, the next question becomes how — how do we go about making the possibility behind these questions a reality?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=1529&tag=nl.e540