Are We Ready For a True Data Disaster?

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions how long we can go before a truly catastrophic data disaster strikes. 'The lure of potential profits in the information economy, combined with the apparent ease with which data can be gathered and a lack of regulation, creates a climate of recklessness in which a "data spill" of the scale of the Deepwater Horizon incident seems not just likely, but inevitable.' Witness Google mistakenly emailing potentially sensitive business data to customers of its Local Business Center service, or the 1.5 million Facebook accounts and passwords recently offered up on an underground hacking forum. 'These incidents seem relatively minor, but as companies gather ever more individually identifiable data and cross-reference these databases in new and more innovative ways, the potential for a major catastrophe grows.'"pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fit.slashdot.org%2Fstory% 2F10%2F05%2F27%2F2018201%2FAre-We-Ready-For-a-True-Data-Disaster" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Are+We+Ready+For+a+True+Data+Disaster% 3F%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FaXlriH" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/05/27/2018201/Are-We-Ready-For-a-True-Data-Disaster?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/JnsMuIdrcemn88HOOjbGVXRpX1Q/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/JnsMuIdrcemn88HOOjbGVXRpX1Q/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/JnsMuIdrcemn88HOOjbGVXRpX1Q/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/JnsMuIdrcemn88HOOjbGVXRpX1Q/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/pKeri3tcC6Y" height="1" width="1"/

More...