No such things as secrets

Maybe it’s time we just accept the fact that we have no privacy.

There are no secrets, no confidential information about our finances, our medical conditions, our taxes or our Social Security accounts.

If we aren’t willing to give up our secrets, we will have to stop putting such information on computer discs and turning it over to the nearest intern for “safekeeping.” That, as we all now know, is what the Ohio Office of Management and Budget did with a disc containing the names and case numbers of 84,000 welfare recipients, the names and federal tax ID numbers of 1,200 vendors that receive payroll deductions from the state, the names and Social Security numbers of all 64,000 state employees, banking records of the state’s school districts and Medicaid providers and details about more than 53,000 people in the state’s pharmacy benefits management program and their dependents. The intern with all this classified data, left it in a portable computer storage device on the seat of his car, from where it was stolen. The disc was a back up to data kept at OMB’s offices – just in case something bad happened to the office computers.

The state’s response to the theft is to hope that the thief, who also took a radar detector, was more interested in the hardware than the data and will be willing to give the disc back. To that end a post office box has been set up in Columbus where it can be returned anonymously.

Welcome to the Information Age.