Disclosure of data security breaches.

• Position: TRENDS AND TRANSITIONS

ChoicePoint, a corporation that collects and compiles personal and financial information on millions of consumers, disclosed last February that it been the victim of a security breach. The company had sold personal information about almost 145,000 people to a con artist involved in an identity-theft scam.

At first, the company only disclosed the breach to California residents, as required by California's Notice of Security Breach law, enacted in 2002. However, ChoicePoint later disclosed that residents in other states, the District of Columbia and three territories also may have been affected. Soon after the disclosures became public, Bank of America disclosed that it had lost computer back-up tapes containing private data that were being transferred to another location on a commercial airline flight, and Seisint, a database company recently acquired by LexisNexis, was hit by hackers who were able to gain access to the personal information for as many as 32,000 people. The single largest security breach was discovered in May: CardSystems Solutions, which processes credit card information for MasterCard and others, revealed that data on more than 40 million credit cards had been stolen after a hacker gained access to the company's systems.

In the weeks after these high profile incidents hit the news, 3S states...