It’s time for the Medical Quack to once again bitch (or I should say quack) about this same topic I have written about over and over for about 3 years.  I have pestered the FTC with all kinds of information, mostly my blog posts on the topic but hey, they are lawyers over there that focus on verbiage of creating or interpreting laws, meanwhile code runs hog wild and they have not a clue as to what’s really going on.  I have never seen anything like this with such dense heads as to what needs to be step one to get anything worth it’s weight on the books as a law.  How in the hell can people for years now stumble all over this with trying to come up with laws when there is no frigging index to identify who all the data sellers are.

Now is this little guy would have been required to buy a license, do think this may have been a deterrent?  Well along with buying a license would require a spot on a federal site to where all license holders would need to keep current with “what kind of data they sell and to who”.  It’s too bad the 60 Minute report a couple weeks ago didn’t have the same effect that we had with high frequency trading this week.  Maybe it’s because nobody has written a book on data sellers????  There are other smart technologists out there and how come nobody else is speaking up?  If you don’t have an index that identifies a group that you want to regulate, you do nothing and that’s what we have now and have had for years.  All want to remain bliss and dumb.  We have Cordray over at the consumer financial protection division, yup another lawyer looking at verbiage while runs hog wild doing a tiny bit with low hanging fruit and work in areas where he doesn’t have to think about code running on servers 24/7. 

Richard Cordray on the Daily Show, Small Efforts, Still Doesn’t Understand Modeling and Data Mechanics As Heard In The Conversation, Low Tech Solutions For High Tech Problems Is About As Good As It Gets..

We are totally screwed having lawyers in control here as all they do is verbiage and have no clue on what goes on behind closed server doors and what data is being sold to who.  When he was appointed I wrote one of my Sebelius doubting Thomas emails about him too as when you just have a lawyer, all they is verbiage and code runs wild with nobody watching the shop.  This is why they get duped, they are all afraid of math and the code that goes with it.

“Algo Duping” – PLOS One Journal Publication Explains Why The Fear of Math Plays a Big Role As One Underlying Reason We All Get Duped And Those Who Don’t Fear Math Take All the Money, Gradually, Using “Mathematical Formulas & Algorithms”

Ok it’s show time and let’s review a couple 60 Minute videos, after all this is one of the few good sources we have anymore for good hard investigative news as news medias are running short on money in so many places.  Video from Chapter 54 of the Killer Algorithms below. 

60 Minutes Confirms the Super Attacks of the Killer Algorithms With Consumer Credit Information With Flawed Data and the Inability to Algorithmically Fix Errors Which Really Makes a Huge Case for Licensing and Taxing All Data Sellers in the US–Chapter 54

And here’s another one, Steve Kroft again on the data sellers…maybe he and I need to write a book to get attention here as consumers continue to get screwed.  Heck I even have the mHealth folks agreeing with me that it won’t take off and do much until we resolve the data selling epidemic. 

60 Minutes Blasts The Data Sellers, FTC Admits They Have Lost Control - Time To License and Excise Tax “ALL” Data Sellers, Banks, Companies, Etc. - Congress Needs to Act On This…

This is very good and you can listen to the head of the FTC kind of snivel and say “we’ve lost control” and yes they are stuck as they only do verbiage over at the FTC as far as understanding regulation, so again we are stuck without the proper talent to regulate.  Lawmakers and others in government just sit around and pretend that big data doesn’t exist out there but there’s a ton of folks who know how to make money from it. 

After this week with high frequency trading news, we did have confrontation on “code running hog ass wild” and it happens in other places as well.  Speaking of Goldman who got out of the HFT trading business, they sell data too, double whammy time maybe?  It would be nice.

So here’s this guy who misrepresents himself to a company in California called Court Ventures and he gets in and steals data and sells it.  Now what Court Ventures would have been required to buy a license to sell data?  Good question here as far as registering what kind of data they sell and to who…and Mr. Thief here would have been on their client list.  He said he was selling data so he would have required a license as well.  So to get a license we add some parameters to meet to have one, again the listing on a federal website to keep current with what kind of data they sell and to who. 

He was shopping around in a data base with 200 million names, all with social security numbers, bank routing numbers, email account names, driver license numbers and picking and choosing what he wanted to sell, and to who, well no license on file as we don’t require that so he could sell to anyone which he did.  The population of the US is around 314 million so calculate your odds of being the 200 million group, they are pretty good that you are in this exposed group as it’s about 2/3 of the US population. 

BOTTOM LINE HERE, WE ARE ALL SCREWED AGAIN AS WE HAVE A BUNCH OF LAWYERS WHO ONLY DO VERBIAGE AND CAN’T GET BEYOND THAT.  CODE RUNS HOG ASS WILD.

So along comes Experian, who makes a lot of money selling data and buys Court Ventures.  The secret service has to catch the thief as it appears Experian did no due diligence and just wanted to buy the company to get more revenue from data being sold. 

You can’t even get decent due diligence any more from big corporations!!  They just want the money from the data. 

Anybody doing any audit trails these days with any fraud prevention algorithms?  We read in the news that everyone is just busting their fanny doing it, but they are not.  We hear about plenty of false positives though with health insurance companies with questionable models and algorithms that deny when they shouldn’t so they are alive and well there when it means keeping profits in the till. 

In another related breach story in Los Angeles, another breach where they did their stealing the old fashioned way and busted down the security doors and ran off with the servers.  This was all medical data related to patients of Los Angeles County hospitals, stolen from a vendor.  We still have not heard an update on the DMV here in California yet with that data breach. 

Thanks to the elevation of value of data and it’s real value, when stolen from a virtual world, we are all at risk every where we turn.  You have Wall Street to thank for part of the data value problem as it all started there with overinflated stock values for data that we need from the virtual worlds, but it’s not the real world. 

Once more here’s the cause… 

Time Has Come to License and Tax the Data Sellers of the Web, Companies, Banks, Social Networks..Any One Making a Profit –Consumers Deserve to Know What Is Being Sold and To Who in a Searchable Format

Feel free to forward this on to any member of Congress as well, as that’s what I’m doing here.  BD 


In what could be one of the biggest data breaches in history, the federal government and authorities in several states are investigating the criminal sale of Social Security numbers, bank account data and other personal information for up to 200 million U.S. citizens.

The investigations stem from the case of Hieu Minh Ngo, a Vietnamese man who pleaded guilty last month in New Hampshire federal court to selling the data to more than 1,300 of his customers, according to a court transcript.

Experian insisted that it had been unaware of the breach until after it bought Court Ventures. It was only then, it said, that "the U.S. Secret Service notified us that Court Ventures had been and was continuing to resell data from a U.S. Info Search database to a third party, possibly engaged in illegal activity."

Experian stressed that none of its own data was stolen. Since learning of the crime, it said, "Experian discontinued the sales of this data immediately," has cooperated with federal prosecutors in the case and "has filed suit against the former owners of Court Ventures for permitting the sale of U.S. Info Search's data to Ngo."

If 200 million people were victimized, it would be among the biggest data breaches ever. In February, the firm Hold Security said it had discovered 360 million personal-account records had been stolen from several companies in attacks yet to be made public. An estimated 130 million credit card numbers were pilfered in a 2009 attack on card processor Heartland Payment Systems.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_25498586/states-probing-massive-data-breach-social-security-numbers

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