Data lost on 650,000 credit card holders

Data lost on 650,000 credit card holders
By DAVID KOENIG, AP Business Writer

PLANO, Texas - Personal information on about 650,000 customers of J.C. Penney and up to 100 other retailers could be compromised after a computer tape went missing.

GE Money, which handles credit card operations for Penney and many other retailers, said Thursday night that the missing information includes Social Security numbers for about 150,000 people.

The information was on a backup computer tape that was discovered missing last October. It was being stored at a warehouse run by Iron Mountain Inc., a data storage company, and was never checked out but can't be found either, said Richard C. Jones, a spokesman for GE Money, part of General Electric Capital Corp.

Iron Mountain spokesman Dan O'Neill said it would take specialized skills for someone to glean the personal data from the tape. He said the company regretted losing the tape, "but because of the volume of information we handle and the fact people are involved, we have occasionally made mistakes."

Penney said it had been told of the situation and referred further inquiries to GE Money. Jones declined to identify the other retailers whose customers' information is missing but said "it includes many of the large retail organizations."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080118/ap_on_hi_te/penney_data_breach

Is there some holocaust of backup tapes going on?

TOTAL number of records containing sensitive personal information
involved in security breaches in the U.S.

http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ChronDataBreaches.htm

just publish a book with all our "private" information in it? :eyes:

stolen and missing data? There are many times when I think about him. I don't think he left the business.

My take on this is that they all sat down at a meeting when they were devloping their People's Database (on us) and decided that they needed to populate it, but not all at once. So they decided to set up a network to 'acquire' the data in a timely manner, by obtaining it from government records, by receiving it willingly for a fee from cooperative banks and corporations, and then when it was no longer willingly given (for a fee or a deal), the 'acquired' it by stealing it.

Populate = load it up with accurate data. Accurate, depending on what you want to do.

Now, they may not intend to use your card to buy things, they will use it to track your habits.

What may not be obvious is why there is a delay in the announcement of 'the loss'.

Now, others might think that it was a hacker. What's the difference between a hacker and our future masters - the fisher-populators?

If they can wheel and deal with guns and nuclear weapons, if they can steal billions from us, if they deal in drugs as has been said, why not wheel and deal with data - for our future control and their selection criteria?

Good old John. It's nice to have a name and face on the project.

The Cali Cartel really impressed them...