Data Loss Puts HP Employees At Risk

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

March 23, 2006, 11:15 AM

Fidelity Investments disclosed Wednesday that a laptop carrying personal information on 196,000 current and former employees of Hewlett Packard was stolen last week. The incident apparently occurred while Fidelity employees were working at an off-site location.

Information on the laptop included names, addresses, social security numbers, dates of birth, and employment information. PINs for the employees' Fidelity accounts were not part of this data. However, the amount of information lost is likely more than enough to pose a potential identity theft threat.

As an additional feature to protect data on these machines, Fidelity adds a special application that encrypts data after an expiration date. According to the company, this application expired the day after the laptop was stolen.

The authorities have been alerted to the loss, Fidelity said. It is likely that the laptop itself was stolen with little regard for its contents, which would likely be deleted anyway to resell the machine, authorities say.

Fidelity said that it had not received any reports of potential data misuse. Both companies are now alerting affected employees, and Fidelity will offer those individuals free credit monitoring for a period of one year.

Data loss is becoming an increasingly bigger problem. Nearly 53 million personal records have been exposed in the past year or so in incidents like this, says the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

However, by the same token, studies have shown in most cases, much of the data is never used. This is due to the amount of time it takes to apply for credit accounts, which is usually on the order of 10 to 15 minutes per application.