T-Mobile Breach
While I'm sure T-Mobile has a fraction of users in comparison to other higher profile wireless services, they still have an estimated 88 million subscribers. Of those, an estimated 50 million subscribers had their data ranging from customer PIN numbers to Social Security Numbers.
Do You Stay Up at Night?
Lets go back just a little with data in general. When Facebook and Google first started gathering data and providing a service not 15 years ago, mass data collection was sort of a niche market. It was poorly understood with little customer expectation on privacy and what should and shouldn't be gathered. Heck, HIPAA, the health authority that still has yet to get some seriously updated data management framework was less than 10 years old when Facebook was started.
Where am I going with this you might ask? Good question, almost lost my direction myself. When you think data, do you still stay up at night and wonder what people are doing with your data? Do you say hmm, I wonder if my phone number I gave to that sketchy site will hurt me in the long run?
Exactly. You don't think about it. Or most normal people don't think about it. Why? It's no big deal. You give the number, who cares, not like Google, Facebook, Amazon already has it and have likely sold it already, right?
THIS SHOULDN'T BE NORMAL!
Future of Your Data and Data Breaches
Here's where T-Mobile comes in. Or at least their data breach. You're probably thinking Oh, good, I don't have T-Mobile, because honestly, who does. Well that's not the point. The point is what companies have my data and what are they doing to protect it.
While the breach itself shouldn't be surprising on the grand scale of breaches, we shouldn't sit idly by as we get promises of "we will do better next time, here's some free identity protection for two years, be gone." If data is their lifeblood, then we need them to prove they will protect it with all their financial might, or they shouldn't be trusted with it. We should be shocked and abhorred at the fact that they haven't done a good enough job to hold our data secure. It shouldn't be when we get breached, it should be if we get breached. I know that's a big ask, and maybe impossible, but it shouldn't be. We shouldn't be normalizing handing our data out to people can't care less about what they do with it.
If we normalize data breaches and continue to provide them willy nilly with information that they should be keeping secure and don't, we will normalize the theft of personal property and we are letting them get away with with a slap on the wrist, because they don't think its important.
Your data should be as important to them as your personal property is to you, otherwise they will abuse it as long as they are in business.
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