MasterCard Says 40 Million Files Are Put at Risk - New York Times

Jesus Christ, this is getting ridiculous. It seems like we don't go a week anymore without hearing about how millions of people's credit card numbers were compromised.

At my job, we work with a lot of personal health related data, and we had to change policies, taketrainingclasses, and actually physically move things around just to make sure we complied with laws surrounding the protection of that data. Those laws are serious and can have pretty serious penalties if they are broken.

Now, I'm no banker or anything, but I wonder why there aren't similar laws protecting people's financial data. Maybe there are, and I just don't know it, but it sure doesn't seem like there are. And if there aren't, why the hell aren't there? If they can take the time to do it for health related data, they ought to be able to do it to protect people's financial records.

Now, I certainly don't want anyone who doesn't have to looking at my health records, but if I had a choice between someone knowing when the last time I was hospitalized was, or knowing my credit card information, I'd rather they know about the hospitalization.

And even if there aren't laws. Companies obviously need to do a better job themselves of protecting this information.