Saturday, May 29, 2010

Lifelock worries after employee data leaked to Web

Identity theft protection company posts CEO's SS number, but not OK with employees data being in public

It may be OK for identity theft protection vendor Lifelock to publish its CEO's Social Security number, but when it comes to other company employees, that's another story.

The company has asked the Phoenix New Times to remove a police report from its Web site after discovering that it contained a redacted Social Security number of Lifelock employee Tamika Jones. The number could be read by simply cutting and pasting the PDF document into another word processing program, a common problem with poorly-redacted documents.

Also in the police report: Jones's date of birth, address, phone number, and address.

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View more related contentGet Daily News by Email"Yesterday, Christy O'Connor of LifeLock called New Times and asked us to remove the link to the PDF document," the New Times reporter Ray Stein wrote in a Tuesday story. "The smart-ass in us couldn't resist giving O'Connor, LifeLock's associate general counsel, some grief."

After Stein pointed out that Jones works for a company that promises to protect customers from identity theft, before it happens, the newspaper agreed to post a properly redacted version of the document on its Web site.

In an interview, Stein said that the fact that Lifelock had to call and ask for the document to be removed reflected badly on Lifelock's service. "I think this shows clearly that they know that it's got potential problems." networkworld

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