Tag Archives: peer-to-peer

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced yesterday that it had notified "almost 100" companies and organizations, including schools and local governments, that sensitive personal information from those entities was being shared across peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing networks. This has apparently resulted in circulation of customer personal information, health information, Social Security numbers and other sensitive data. 

Poorly supervised use of P2P networks have frequently been the subject of unwanted attention,… More

Last week, it was learned that a secret report of the U.S. House of Representatives Ethics Committee was disclosed — apparently inadvertently — by a junior committee staff member.  This staff apparently stored the file on a home computer that also ran a "peer-to-peer" file-sharing service.  Just as peer-to-peer services let you share music and games, they also can give outside users access to other files on your computer, including in this case secret Congressional reports. … More

In this, the third and final part of Security, Privacy and the Law’s interview with M. Eric Johnson (Part 1 may be found here and Part 2 is here), Dr. Johnson talks about why the fragmented nature of the American healthcare system is so dangerous and why he believes greater consolidation would better protect private information. He also talks about the specific problems associated with data security on peer-to-peer file sharing networks.… More

In this, the second part of Privacy, Security and the Law’s three part interview with M. Eric Johnson (begun here), Dr. Johnson talks about why he thinks the healthcare sector is uniquely vulnerable to security breaches and what special problems that vulnerability poses. More

Security, Privacy, and The Law recently had the chance to sit down with Dr. M. Eric Johnson to talk about his recent paper “Data Hemorrhages in the Health-Care Sector.” Dr. Johnson’s study has been in the news lately because many were startled by his finding that a great deal of patient healthcare information is available on peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks. We are thrilled that Dr. Johnson agreed to do a interview with Security, Privacy, and The Law and we will be posting the full interview with Dr. Johnson in several parts.

On Thursday, March 5, 2009, Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), Congressman John Barrow (D-GA) and Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) introduced the Informed P2P User Act (H.R. 1319) which requires peer-to-peer ("P2P") software makers to make certain changes to their software to prevent users from inadvertently sharing files from their computers.  The proposed law would require both "clear and conspicuous notice" of what files the P2P software would being sharing and "informed consent"… More

According to the Identity Theft Resource Center’s (ITRC) recently released report (.pdf) on data breaches in 2008, one of the top five causes of data breaches are what the ITRC labels “accidental exposure.”   [For our earlier coverage on the ITRC’s report see this link.] The ITRC reports that accidental exposure amount to 95 of the 656 data breaches in 2008.

ITRC considers “accidental exposure”… More