SCENARIO
Please use the following to answer the next QUESTION:
Your organization, the Chicago (U.S.)-based Society for Urban Greenspace, has used the same vendor to
operate all aspects of an online store for several years. As a small nonprofit, the Society cannot afford the higher-priced options, but you have been relatively satisfied with this budget vendor, Shopping Cart Saver (SCS). Yes, there have been some issues. Twice, people who purchased items from the store have had their credit card information used fraudulently subsequent to transactions on your site, but in neither case did the investigation reveal with certainty that the Society’s store had been hacked. The thefts could have been employee-related.
Just as disconcerting was an incident where the organization discovered that SCS had sold information it had collected from customers to third parties. However, as Jason Roland, your SCS account representative, points out, it took only a phone call from you to clarify expectations and the “misunderstanding” has not occurred again.
As an information-technology program manager with the Society, the role of the privacy professional is only one of many you play. In all matters, however, you must consider the financial bottom line. While these problems with privacy protection have been significant, the additional revenues of sales of items such as shirts and coffee cups from the store have been significant. The Society’s operating budget is slim, and all sources of revenue are essential.
Now a new challenge has arisen. Jason called to say that starting in two weeks, the customer data from the store would now be stored on a data cloud. “The good news,” he says, “is that we have found a low-cost provider in Finland, where the data would also be held. So, while there may be a small charge to pass through to you, it won’t be exorbitant, especially considering the advantages of a cloud.”
Lately, you have been hearing about cloud computing and you know it’s fast becoming the new paradigm for various applications. However, you have heard mixed reviews about the potential impacts on privacy protection. You begin to research and discover that a number of the leading cloud service providers have signed a letter of intent to work together on shared conventions and technologies for privacy protection. You make a note to find out if Jason’s Finnish provider is signing on.
What process can best answer your Questions about the vendor’s data security safeguards?
Which is the best way to view an organization’s privacy framework?
What is the main purpose in notifying data subjects of a data breach?
SCENARIO
Please use the following to answer the next QUESTION:
You lead the privacy office for a company that handles information from individuals living in several countries
throughout Europe and the Americas. You begin that morning’s privacy review when a contracts officer sends you a message asking for a phone call. The message lacks clarity and detail, but you presume that data was lost.
When you contact the contracts officer, he tells you that he received a letter in the mail from a vendor stating that the vendor improperly shared information about your customers. He called the vendor and confirmed that your company recently surveyed exactly 2000 individuals about their most recent healthcare experience and sent those surveys to the vendor to transcribe it into a database, but the vendor forgot to encrypt the database as promised in the contract. As a result, the vendor has lost control of the data.
The vendor is extremely apologetic and offers to take responsibility for sending out the notifications. They tell you they set aside 2000 stamped postcards because that should reduce the time it takes to get the notice in the mail. One side is limited to their logo, but the other side is blank and they will accept whatever you want to write. You put their offer on hold and begin to develop the text around the space constraints. You are content to let the vendor’s logo be associated with the notification.
The notification explains that your company recently hired a vendor to store information about their most recent experience at St. Sebastian Hospital’s Clinic for Infectious Diseases. The vendor did not encrypt the information and no longer has control of it. All 2000 affected individuals are invited to sign-up for email notifications about their information. They simply need to go to your company’s website and watch a quick advertisement, then provide their name, email address, and month and year of birth.
You email the incident-response council for their buy-in before 9 a.m. If anything goes wrong in this situation, you want to diffuse the blame across your colleagues. Over the next eight hours, everyone emails their comments back and forth. The consultant who leads the incident-response team notes that it is his first day with the company, but he has been in other industries for 45 years and will do his best. One of the three lawyers on the council causes the conversation to veer off course, but it eventually gets back on track. At the end of the day, they vote to proceed with the notification you wrote and use the vendor’s postcards.
Shortly after the vendor mails the postcards, you learn the data was on a server that was stolen, and make the decision to have your company offer credit monitoring services. A quick internet search finds a credit monitoring company with a convincing name: Credit Under Lock and Key (CRUDLOK). Your sales rep has never handled a contract for 2000 people, but develops a proposal in about a day which says CRUDLOK will:
1.Send an enrollment invitation to everyone the day after the contract is signed.
2.Enroll someone with just their first name and the last-4 of their national identifier.
3.Monitor each enrollee’s credit for two years from the date of enrollment.
4.Send a monthly email with their credit rating and offers for credit-related services at market rates.
5.Charge your company 20% of the cost of any credit restoration.
You execute the contract and the enrollment invitations are emailed to the 2000 individuals. Three days later you sit down and document all that went well and all that could have gone better. You put it in a file to reference the next time an incident occurs.
Which of the following was done CORRECTLY during the above incident?
TESTED 19 May 2024
