No matter what resentments you hold against your employer, in an economy like this you have to bite your tongue and be thankful you have a job.
That’s got to be especially tough for the 30,000 Kaiser Permanente employees who just found out someone has stolen their personal information in the form of what looks like human resources records. Restraint must be harder still for the handful of employees who have already suffered identity theft as a result of the security breach.
Kaiser Permanente notified their employees of the security breach last week, saying they’d been contacted by the police who said they’d discovered a computer file with Kaiser employee information in the possession of an arrest suspect.
The file contained the employees’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers and birth dates. The file did not contain any of the employee’s personal health information.
Kaiser Permanente was fined $200,000 in 2005 for exposing the personal information of 150 patients over the Internet. The company created a publicly accessible test website in 1999 populated with the names, addresses, telephone numbers and lab results of 150 patients without the patients’ prior consent.
The site remained accessible for several years until a frustrated former web coordinator and Kaiser employee brought it to the attention of federal regulators by posting a link to the site from her own blog. Kaiser responded by suing the web coordinator.
Visit LifeLock.com to learn more about their strategies for helping to protect your personal information, your credit and name.
One Comment
with a little more research you’d see that kaiser has had 4 data breaches in the last few years affecting more than 200,000 people! i lost my job with them last year and now i have to deal wiht this too!