[Dataloss] Laptop with Hewlett-Packard employees' ID stolen (fwd)

[Greg Broiles]

To follow up further, the Mercury News ran another article today in
the Business section discussing a rise in laptop thefts locally,
suggesting that laptop thieves are targeting rental cars parked on or
near El Camino Real, a street which runs from San Jose to San
Francisco and which, in many stretches, has many popular restaurants
and motels, and hence is likely to attract out-of-town visitors,
especially business visitors.

The article, online at
<http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/personal_technology/14203718.htm>,
discloses further details re the HP/Fidelity dataloss:

[...]

"In the case involving HP employee data, a traveling Fidelity
Investments account representative was having dinner at PF Chang's in
the Stanford Shopping Center on March 15. One of the Fidelity
employees went out to get something from the vehicle and accidentally
left it unlocked, said Ryan.

When the group came out from the restaurant around 8:30 p.m., the
laptop that had been in the car was gone and there was no sign of
forced entry.

[...]

According to an HP memo provided to its employees last week, the
Fidelity representative was traveling with the laptop to demonstrate a
new software product to HP. The HP employee data was imported onto the
laptop for the software demonstration.

Hewlett-Packard told its employees in the memo that it was not
informed by Fidelity ahead of time that actual data would be used by
the Fidelity representative.

``HP views this as a very serious problem,'' the memo stated. HP
spokeswoman Brigida Bergkamp declined to comment.

Ann Crowley, a Fidelity spokeswoman, said ``it is not our practice to
have that level of data on a laptop.''

[...]

--
Greg Broiles, JD, LLM Tax, EA
gbroiles at gmail.com (Lists only. Not for confidential communications.)
Law Office of Gregory A. Broiles
San Jose, CA