Outsourced Confidential Data On Children Posted 438
Kataire writes "MSNBC exposes a grievous blunder in which an outsourced programmer posts highly confidential data to a public website, concerning the daily whereabouts of hundreds of children in upstate New York. Yes, this person did this not once, or twice, but three times, with two different data sets. Even worse, the data was out there, publicly 'visible' for months. Just because RentACoder finally discovered and yanked it, after a coder 'stuck with a tricky formatting issue' posted the specific database he was working on to their messageboards, doesn't mean the damage is undone. The ramifications reach beyond the painfully obvious privacy issues, touching on outsourcing and peer ethics."
Who do you trust? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who do you trust? And who do you get to solve something like this?
Do you say, "Only certain government approved facilities can deal with this sort of information?" Seriously, should I feel that someone "government sponsored" is better off with my information than an outsourced programmer in India? Who gets to play Big Brother? And what will they do with what they know?
You can take this to the extreme, and be wary of anyone to handle private data about you. But then, if there's that sort of outcry, nobody would be able to handle it, would they?
I suppose it's better than having the Smoking Man from the X-Files having a file about you, and a blood sample. I find most programmers to have a certain level of professionalism to what they do.
I personally have access to roughly 10,000 credit card numbers. I'll never abuse the fact that I have access to them. But on the other hand, I'm not stupid enough to post all of them on the net for everybody to see, either.
I hope anybody who ends up doing something that stupid becomes a victim of identity theft. That'll really open their eyes to respecting other people's privacy.
By the way, I hate how everybody gets up in arms over the fact that this is data from children. This is horrible for ANYBODY to have their information posted on the net like this. And it could have been worse. It could have been a list of women tying them to the current Battered Women's Shelter they were staying at.
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:5, Informative)
And what will they do with what they know? They claim to be able to pinpoint every move you made from college to getting tossed out your duplex etc.,
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:4, Informative)
Note I bolded the 16 and the date, there is a page somewhere on that monstrous site which states they have 40 billion. I've seen it a few times unfortunately I can't pinpoint the location right now.
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for a large healthcare organization. A while back, we caught some heat because we were transferring a lot of patient data over to India for use in one of our offshore projects and a local newspaper found out about it. Our official response was "Hey, Americans do this work too. It's not necessarily safer there than here."
A month later, one of the outsourced programmers took off with a couple of backup tapes and blackmailed my company.
This exposed the real issue at hand here: Offshore workers aren't in America, which means that we found ourselves unable to bring the weight of American law enforcement to bear on this person. In America, we would have had the FBI kicking in this guy's door within the hour. Instead, this individual simply moved to a different part of India, which is apparently like moving to another planet for the purposes of getting them arrested. The issue was clamped down on by management before the resolution, but the word around the water cooler is that we just paid them off -- really, the amount of money they wanted was insignificant against the massive PR damage we were looking at.
So while it's true that a worker in America can spill private data just as easily as a worker in the third world, *getting away* with it is a completely different matter. Companies which offshore private data deserve the lawsuits they'll face when something like this actually plays out wrong...
Oops.... (Score:5, Funny)
Guess my sig goes double now...
Re:Oops.... (Score:5, Funny)
See, this is how ya do it :)
....SHIT!
Re:Oops.... (Score:5, Funny)
-B
Re:Oops.... (Score:5, Informative)
I used to work for a healthcare transaction company, and we developers had absolutely no access to patient data. I had no access to production databases, just dev and staging. Those databases used fake test data only. We weren't likely to be sued by Ima Genius or Homer Simpson over the loss of their records.
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:5, Funny)
Dibbs on his 3 digit user ID when his company has him killed!
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:4, Informative)
And was it India or Pakistan? And was the "Indian" really a Pakistani woman named Lubna Baloch? And was the problem really because UCSF required such little control over the custody of the medical records that it allowed them to be handed of to a chain of at least four levels of subcontractors before they ended up in Pakistan?
Oh, and was it really Sonya Newburn who paid off Baloch?
It's not so super-secret as you think. And the real issue (in your hospital's case) isn't that you couldn't bring the weight of American law enforcement to bear, it's that your organization completely lost control of the data that was entrusted to it.
Incidentally, UCSF has revised its contracts to require its transcriptions firms to reveal who they subcontract with.
P.S., if you click on the little "Post Anonymously" checkbox, your
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:3, Funny)
Ha! Highly unlikely. If you really want something done, and done right, you don't call the cops or the lawyers, you call the guy who knows dis guy and he "does this favor for you."
-cp-
President Bush to Liberate Alaska [alaska-freegold.com]
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:3, Interesting)
Your company could probably get hit with a violation of 42 U.S.C. 1320D-6(a), which is a federal law. If m
Re:Who do you trust? Guess what pal ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:3, Insightful)
Some notes (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference is that a government employee is easier to discipline. Both can be fired, but the regular employee can be prosecuted more easily than an off-site subcontractor who may be out of state (or co
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, the article suggested that these kids are foster kids, which means that at a minimum they were victims of neglect to the extent that the state stepped in and removed them from their birth parents.
It's likely that a number of these kids were victims of sexual abuse. Needless to say, many of them have views on sexual issues that are warped by their experience. A predator would likely know how to take advantage of their experience.
Also, typically, the goal is to re-unite them with their parents. Obviously, some of these parents are not worth anything. But a number of them are genuinely trying to do whatever they can to make their family right. This doesn't help.
My wife works with kids in this situation, and I don't know any names ever. I don't want to know, and she takes her commitment to their confidentiality very seriously.
I hope we get to hear what becomes of Mr. Mark Dennis, the fine bleeding-edge developer who had to ask RentACoder for database formatting help. It would only be fitting if we all got to experience his worst or most vulnerable moment. I'll turn it into HTML for $15.
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would prefer to trust someone who has enough sense not to provide confidential data to anyone that has not been properly trained in its handling.
It is all too likely that the person that "released" the data had no real understanding of whether the data was real or what it meant.
This is just plain sloppy procedure. It doesn't matter if the development staff is in-house, local out-sourced, or out-sourced to the other side of the world -- they still don't need the real data in order to develop code.
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:5, Informative)
In this particular case, you needn't trust anyone.
Nothing that Mark Dennis wanted to do -- build the database structure, build the front-end, or get help with his "tricky formatting problem" required that he use supply real data to RentaACoders or other sub contractors
And furthermore, nothing the Livingston County Social Services Commission wanted required that Mark Dennis ever see live data.
This one's simple, folks -- sure, Mark (or someone) needed to do a requirements analysis, sure, somebody had to decide what data entities to capture -- but very little real data was needed.
First, make some dummy data for the developers' use: run through your real data -- if you even need to base the dummy data off the real data --, and replace every name with a random dictionary word. Do the same thing for addresses, and replace Social Security and other id numbers with randomly chosen numbers. In all cases, maintain a constant map of real to dummy, to preserve relations within the data: "Mike Smith" is always translated to "Armchair Landowner" and "1450 Main Street" to "3321 Crumpet Sponge".
Once you've finished your translation, throw away the map.
Now the coder has data that's exactly as diverse as the real data, shows the same frequencies and inter-relations as the real data, is as internally self-consistent as the real data, and yet is (nearly) completely meaningless in terms of the real world, and (nearly) impossible to link to any real persons, places, or identifying information.
(It's possible one could still do traffic analysis on the data, and come up with aggregate data: either more male or more female (but which?) children are in the Social Services system; two zip codes out of six produce 70% of the cases (but which two?). If this is a problem you have to take a weighted slice of the data, and provide the developer with only this weighted slice; that (intentionally) skews your frequencies, but still preserves diverse data and any inter-relations among that data, closely enough to be representative for almost all design and coding needs.)
No trust involved. Just a simple and mechanical translation process that has to take place only once.
(If you really have a situation where the developer must base his requirements and code against gradually accumulating real world data -- and you shouldn't if you've planned at all well -- let one non-out sourced person hold the translation map -- and be held responsible for keeping it secret.)
And a process like I've outlined should be standard for any organization dealing with sensitive data.
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've worked on several enterprise projects so far, and in _none_ of them did I need any actual production data while coding the app. All the test databases we worked on were filled with dummy data. Including login accounts, addresses, products/materials, financial data, etc. You name it, it was fake.
What you do need are a few examples that _look_ like the real data. They don't come from a coder, they're not real data that ran through some encription cod
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it would suck if my daily schedule was put up in the internet. Then I'd have to worry about pedophiles or my crazy parent with the restraining order snatching me up.
Oh, wait - I'm an adult male who carries a cell phone, "pocket knife", and just enough martial arts experience to get me out of (okay, into) trouble.
Stories like this about children ARE different. Adults might have the means and methods to deal with the consequences of such a massive blunder. Children DO NOT! Especially lists about kids in day care: children who are pre-selected to be literally unable to take care of themselves.
Oh, and your "even worse" example sucks too. At least women in shelter are somehow connected with help. Think instead of a database of phone calls to an abuse hotline - lots of women who are totally vulnerable.
To borrow from the pigs in "1984": All privacy breeches are equally bad, but some are just way effin' worse than others.
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:2)
But, anyone can legally find out what shelter your moms staying at currently
I very much doubt that is true as the whole point of women's shelters is normally that they are confidential. Most women staying there have escaped abusive situations and are essentially hiding from their abusive partner. No way would the shelter give out names of their residents as it would defeat the whole point of the shelter.
What message board? (Score:3, Funny)
Today's lesson: (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer is simple: (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe now someone will pay attention. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe now someone will pay attention. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Maybe now someone will pay attention. (Score:3, Insightful)
Now I'm not an american, but I assume that your congressmen are all on pretty damn healthy wages, like they are pretty much everywhere, so I don't think that their children would be involved in this child care program.
I'm not surprised (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if the parent company that hired this 'outsourcer', even knows that their data has been compromised...
the dumbasses... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:the dumbasses... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:the dumbasses... (Score:5, Informative)
1. It's bad to develop with real data, because you make assumptions about what kinda of data you have to process. You should unit test the code, by *trying* to break it by using known invalid formats or invalid data to ensure that your software handles such input inconsistancies gracefully. As in, the only way to be sure your software won't core, or fork bomb, or enter an infinate loop is to test it on test data, which should be created by the developer.
2. You're right about going live tho. You'd never go live with software before you QA'd it in the final go-around with the real data just to ensure you're not going to spend 2 hours upgrading a platform, and 2 hours backing out.
Neither of these points has any bearing on the fact that, as a developer, you will (most of the time) have/need access to the real data at some point, so it really is up to the developer and the contractor to set out rules for the usage of the data, and even to have the developer sign an NDA of sorts to put the accountability where it should belong.
What stories like this really highlight is the sorts of losses that can occur from outsourcing or contracting that dont often show up on a cost analysis of the project. The less control and supervision you have over your 'employees', the higher the likelihood that those employees may do something with their relationship with you that may damage the company. I've had numerous higher-ups in other companies pass me sensitive data just because they need something fixed as soon as possible, and they can't find the experience/ability in house, and I just think its a completely irresponsible way of conducting business. But if I did something dumb with that data, it wouldn't be my ass on the line, because I was handed that data with no legal documentation concerning how I can use it and what I can do with it. Then again, maybe lawyers might see that differently.
All I know is that when it comes to outsourcing, its usually a gain in labour flexbility and cost effectiveness at the expense of a higher risk for the disclosure of sensitive information, be it data or security rights. It's a cost that employers can willfully ignore if they so choose, but again, I think its just bad business practices. Full employees have a far greater vested interest in the success of their employer and are far less likely to do stoopid things that one-off contractees have been known to do. That is, full time employees are more likely consider the legal and financial implications of how they go about providing solutions for product development. Employers hate that to admit it, tho, because it highlites the downside of a their utopian flexible labour force in which there exists little job security for the people actually doing the gruntwork.
Re:the dumbasses... (Score:3)
That's not really what I'm talking about, though. For example, I've worked with databases where the CS department entered in all X's instead of physically deleting an address. Their programmers had simply coded to ignor
Re:the dumbasses... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm guessing it's because he was a lazy dumbass who just didn't give a rip about the confidentiality of low-income kids in foster care.
Given that the article mentions he was informed that he'd posted live data, responded that he'd made a mistake and wouldn't repeat it, and then re-posted
Coincidences (Score:3, Funny)
In other news: Michael Jackson to move to NY soon.
Downside of outsourcing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Downside of outsourcing (Score:3, Insightful)
Before we bash on outsourcing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Before we bash on outsourcing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Before we bash on outsourcing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since this is an outsourced job, there is very little, if any recourse that can be taken against the person in question. Perhaps US companies will see this and think "whoa, if this happens to me, and somebody sues me...who can I sue?"
It's sad that corporations are sending jobs overseas in the name of cheap labour. I frown upon the implications of the term "human resources". However, it's also sad that there are countries in the world poor enough that they can offer labour at those prices. I wish everyone had a standard of living equal to what I enjoy here, and I'm afraid outsourcing may be the way to do it. At this point, all I can hope is that the outsourcing is done in an ethical way - no sweatshops, no gang-ruled factories, no government corruption. Unfortunately, since money is involved, it suffers from all those things and more...
Not "unscrupulous", just stupid... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unscrupulous? No, just incompetent. Posting credit card numbers to some hacker site is unscrupulous; this guy's just too stupid to do his job.
Not just stupid -- unscrupulous. (Score:5, Insightful)
(A "scruple" is a unit of weight, don't you know.)
Publicly posting government records of children's whereabouts is not a morally neutral act; it is a reprehensible one. The programmer in question was not, it is claimed, ignorant of the nature of the data he had in hand; he simply did not correctly value that data. He failed to make a necessary value judgment: that to post masses of information on children's whereabouts is, in our world, a wrong thing to do.
It is not simply a stupid or ignorant thing to do. It is not simply incompetent, like writing C code with gets() in it, or turning in code to one's boss which won't compile. Rather, it is a form of carelessness that shows that one places no value upon that with which one has been entrusted.
If you're the sysadmin of a mail system, reading other people's mail for fun is an unethical act. However, leaving the mail-system password lying around, so that random hooligans can read other people's mail, is also an unethical act. Not just stupid. Wrong. It shows that you don't value your users' privacy -- that your values do not match up with your users' values. That, while you may be competent to operate a system for them, you are not trustworthy to do so.
That is a very different way to be bad at one's job.
Re:Before we bash on outsourcing... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure it's "unscrupulous" as clueless. Whether he's paid as an employee, a consultant, or a sub-contractor, he's just as responsible to treat sensitive data appropriately. He should have been fired the first time, or at least warned in writing and fired the second time. Allowing this to happen three times exposes both the agency (who's responsible for managing its vendors) and the vendor to tremendous liability because they've obviously not taken this issue seriously.
Re:Before we bash on outsourcing... (Score:3, Interesting)
If one of the programmers at a children's hos
Re:Before we bash on outsourcing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Before we bash on outsourcing... (Score:5, Insightful)
County attorney David Morris said that programming work for the day-care center had been outsourced to the locally-based Genesee Community College. The manager of the college's program refused to speak to a reporter, but Morris said Dennis was a third party consultant hired by Genesee. Dennis, in turn, used RentACoder to once again subcontract the database work, which ultimately fell to a New Jersey-based programmer. By that time, the programmer actually working on the day-care data was four steps removed from the county's social services program.
So the gist is they outsourced to a CommunityCollege who then outsourced it to a website. The coder who answered the website not only didn't know what he was doing and tried to get someone else to help him, he probably had no idea the significance of the data to begin with. Since nobody who had a clue actually hired him. Outsourcing something that important is exactly what is wrong. I've seen companies outsource jobs that were essential to the well being of the company and nobody in charge (CEO,CIO) will admit that the reason the business failed was due to putting something critical in the hands of others who didn't have the same priorities as them. You should only outsource when the task is not critical and doing it yourself is too expensive. If it's important and you don't have the expertise, hire employees who do. Then when something is needed, you get it when you want it and how you want it. If neither is possible choose another line work.
Sad to say.... (Score:5, Interesting)
This, and the Florida case will be brought up again and again. And I am sad to say that these are just the beginning of a long decline.
Confidential data on slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
Outsourced or not? (Score:5, Funny)
If it's an outsourced programmer, shouldn't it be Lima, Peru?
Obvious bias in post! (Score:5, Insightful)
You are entirely correct. (Score:3, Funny)
But there is a line.
Every person who is reading this article, every person who wrote this article, is wearing an "outsourced" shirt (maybe even made in India! look at your textile tag!), looking at an "outsourced" watch (usually Taiwan), staring at an "outsourced" computer monitor (again, Taiwan), and ready to drive home from their job which is "threatened by outsourcing" in their "outsourced" Japanese car. T
Re:Obvious bias in post! (Score:5, Insightful)
In theory, a non-outsourced developer can do the same mistake. But there is something important called relationship and trust.
If a developer is in-house, if he has talked to clients, project manager, if he had be given a lecture on how the data is sensitive, you can bet that this developer will not mistakenly post that data on the web. Sure he can be corrupted, but that's not what happened here.
On the other hand, if some code-monkey receives some coding to do for an unknown company, in an unknown place, for an unknown application, and he is given a set of data not knowning what it is, then he might publish his data without knowning what he is doing.
The "outsource" stuff is important, not because of some "save jobs" issue, but because it implies the developer should never had received this data in the first place.
If some company/government entity outsources some programming job, it should give said developers only fake datas. And administration jobs with access to the real datas should be done by trusted guys.
Re:Obvious bias in post! (Score:4, Insightful)
When you outsource to a company that specializes in IT work, and that gets outsourced to a database contractor, the sensitive data is no longer in an institution used to handling it. Yes, you might have an unscrupulous or incompetent coder in your orginzation, but you are far more likely to have a problem when you hire someone because they are cheap and they can code. The instititional controls and culture that protect the data are not in place after 3 degrees of outsourcing.
Re:Obvious bias in post! (Score:3, Insightful)
Look! Outsourcing Bad!! NOT. (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be better titled:
"Idiot makes mistake, exposes private data to Net. Sound thrashing in progress."
Re:Look! Outsourcing Bad!! NOT. (Score:2)
Of course, the thrashing could be inflicted faster & with less preliminary legal wrangling if the culprit had been a regular employee & not an outsourced "consultant."
Regular employees take employers to court after the thrashing. Outsourced consultants have to be taken to court before the thrashing.
Re:Look! Outsourcing Bad!! NOT. (Score:2)
In both cases, a person made an error in judgement. The relation of that person to their employer does not have an impact on their judgement, IMO; regular employees and consultants are both equally capable of making bad decisions.
Yes, it was bad that the data was posted. That the individual was outsourced is irrelevant.
Re:Look! Outsourcing Bad!! NOT. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, it's far easier in most states to manage a consultant or vendor than an employee, because employees are covered by labor protection laws, while vendors have to live up to their contract. So if the contract is at all reasonable, their should be immediate, significant financial penalties for their violating professional ethi
Just wait..... (Score:2)
How do you feel about outsourcing the programing done on medical record programs?
Is it really gone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Medical Industry (Score:4, Insightful)
Jamon
Peer ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
That he has even tought of posting his customer's true dataset is inforgivably moronic. Whether it was data on children's whereabouts, credit card information, or even "just" accounting information on some business.
While it is true that not revealing your customer's data is the ethical thing to do, it's also just plain ol' common sense.
Though I should perhaps say vintage common sense. Seems that product has been discontinued for some years now.
-- MG
Shock, horror (Score:2, Insightful)
a user named Mark Dennis, stuck with a tricky formatting issue, posted his question to RentACoder.
Chist, they're even stealing our anglo saxon names, is there no end to this perfidious threat?
Multiple Problems (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Looks like the IT work was being done on a budget. I mean they are not hiring Anderson to do this stuff right (OK, bad example, I know...)
2) But someone was paying SOME money if it could be subcontracted multiple times and the work was getting done...or was it.
3) It looks like it was contracted DOWN past someone's ability to do the job. It is kind of the opposite of the Peter's principle. Non interesting IT work keeps getting pushed down the chain until it is in the hands of
Yikes! (Score:4, Insightful)
"not yet determined"!?! Those parents should be informed so they can be alert for trouble.
This verges on criminal. (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact that the data went through multiple levels of subcontractors doesn't bother me, so long as each has signed the appropriate waivers and so long as each have been checked out enough to be trusted with the data. But there's no excuse for leaving proprietary and/or sensitive information out there, unprotected.
Password-protecting an entire directory is trivial. 20 seconds to a seasoned user, or a few minutes in a web interface for a newbie. This info wasn't just accidentally left unprotected; it was intentionally posted to a public-facing site, in an attempt to attract programming assistance. This, on it's own, could easily be called criminally negligent. But after being warned of the potential consequences and posting it again the following day... that's verging on knowing child endangerment. Use dummy data, for crying out loud!
Everyone makes mistakes, myself included. I'll admit to posting members-only data in a public area once or twice. But once you know about it, there's no excuse to not fix it. This guy should probably be prosecuted. And while I hope the families get notified... I seriously doubt most of the affected families will ever find out.
Oh... and write this story down, boys and girls. This is yet one more nail in the coffin for TIA-styled programs. "Oh, we're very careful with our data." Right.
Procedure, Procedure, Prodecure (Score:5, Interesting)
It also doesn't address what I think the biggest problem is. It's obvious to me someone assumed this bozo of a programmer had some not-so-common-sense about posting information to a website. I deal with customer data all the time, and my company has taken some steps to make it a little harder for people who should not need the data to not get the data, and our data exchange policy clearly states "Do not give this data to anyone outside of this company or you will be beheaded!"
I get to this day accountants in our company saying "why can't I peek at this customer's data" to which I reply "Do you have a signficant need? If so, tell your manager to talk to my manager, and I'll be happy to give it to you." I get nothing after that. The customer data we have is for support and development use, not an accountant who has no use for inventory and sales information (at least not in this company). It is also freely accessible amongst those people, who typically only share it within others in their department.
One day a manager might get an idea that looking at a customer's data might give them an idea of their open bills, but that might be unethical or illegal so until a manager says to give access, I won't.
My point is, it could be that the policy was not pounded into this dolt's head, or that a proper data exchange policy even existed. If so, he's still a dumbass, but companies frequently hire dumbasses, which is why you sometimes need a policy to help prevent dumbass behavior. The article puts full blame on the programmer and doesn't really give any blame to the company who hired him.
These violations are RAMPANT. (Score:5, Interesting)
You would not believe the sensitive information we receive. People don't even think about the ramifications when they send us, for example, somebody's high school transcript, or mortgage closing documents, or people's credit reports. We have secret inventory lists for competing companies, each of which would probably kill to get their hands on that information. We have "insider" information on the international banking industry. We have medical records. Prison records. It goes on and on.
Because of this, we have an extremely tight document policy. Data exists on paper only long enough for testing purposes, then it is destroyed. The bug tracking database is purged of old test cases on a regular basis. Customer files never leave this office, in paper form or otherwise.
In fact, as I write this message, I can think of several ways that we should probably be even more paranoid. Fortunately, the officers of the company take our responsibilities very seriously, and there has never been any serious breach of customer confidentiality. I hope there never is.
The programmer who posted identifiable information to a public web site, because he was too incompetent to solve his own problems, is an idiot who should be fired and beaten with a wicker cane.
Kidnappings correlated? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also for everyone who says: "This could happen with an American programmer just as easily." Yes that is true but you could punnish that programmer but you will have a hard time punishing programmers in other countries.
Stupid coder, stupider company... (Score:4, Interesting)
"It's not likely all those visitors unzipped the attached database, but there's no way to know how many did, according to RentACoder CEO Dan Ippolito."
This company is so damn stupid they don't know how to check their logs to see how many times that file was downloaded,
Is outsourcing the main problem here? (Score:3, Insightful)
What happened here is certainly appalling, but I'm not so sure that outsourcing is the main problem. Outsourcing arguably increases the risk of problems of this sort because an in-house programmer is more likely to know the rules of the game, but this seems to me to be a fine point. On the one hand, in-house IT staff are not necessarily going to be well-informed about privacy issues and the nature of the data they are working with. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to make such constraints clear to contractors and to make them part of the contract.
It seems to me that there are several other issues here as well. For instance, why would any programmer be working with the whole, real database? I can see that if the job is convert an irregularly formatted text file into a usable database, but that is about the only situation in which the programmer needs the real data. Otherwise he or she just needs to know what the data looks like. If sample data is needed, it can be a small subset, and critical information can be camouflaged. Of course, the same applies to the programmer asking for help on RentACoder. There's no need for him to post his whole database.
It seems to me that the real problems here are:
Before the India/outsourcing bashing begins (Score:4, Insightful)
This work was outsourced, not offshored. This article has obviously been posted to show how outsourcing threatens the future of our children. This work wasn't offshored. It was done by an American programmer. If outsourcing is bad, why did the navy outsource a 5billion $ chunk of IT work to EDS?
Could be even worse with offshoring (Score:3, Interesting)
This is one of the things that really concerns me about offshoring. As US corporations keep outsourcing software development to another countries, the confidential data will inevitably move there too.
How long before private information like credit histories, medical records etc. is leaked out from some company in Bangalore?
Imagine being blackmailed by someone in a third world country. Given the state of law enforcement over there, you would have no legal recourse.
[/paranoia]Who made the blunder? (Score:5, Interesting)
Both could be called correct, but more interesting is how the positioning of the story indicates the inclination of the news source. MSNBC is part of the mainstream news establishment that has been telling us for years that the government hasn't done a good thing since kicking the British out of Yorktown.
Slashdot speaks to a lot of developers who don't ever want to work for a place called "RentaCoder", and don't have a lot of respect for anyone who would.
Personally, I much prefer the Slashdot take on the story.
The Real Kicker (Score:4, Interesting)
County officials have not yet determined if they will tell the families involved about the incident.
If that isn't sick I don't know what is. I thought it might be more like 'haven't decided how to tell....' not IF they would tell
This is relatively simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're an independent consultant, your insurance agent has probably mentioned "Software errors and omissions" insurance to you. Software E&O coverage is written to protect your ass(ets) in the event that you colossally screw up and do something that gets your client's client answering awkward questions from major news organizations. (A colleague once observed that, "if, when you walk in the door in the morning, your secretary says that a CBS producer is on the phone trying to schedule you for an interview with Mike Wallace, it's probably a bad day.")
Suffice it to say that if Mark Dennis doesn't have Software E&O coverage, he's going to wish he did. Because he's going to get so sued. Along with the community college, the government agency, and everybody else involved.
Getting sued, however, is the least of this bozo's worries
If he has insurance, it might cover his liability exposure. However, his real problem is the civil fines he is going to have to pay--and no insurance policy in the world will protect you from a criminal court sentence. He'll get a whopping fine--but I doubt he'll do jail time. Unless, that is, somebody can demonstrate that a child molester used the database to identify a victim and attacked him.
There's an important point here
The software community should make it ABUNDANTLY CLEAR that this dumb cluck should have the book thrown at him. We have absolutely zero sympathy--and when his attorney (with nothing else to argue) says "it was all a tragic mistake..." somebody needs to stand up and yell, "LIES! LIES! DAMNABLE LIES!" This was willful, deliberate, with knowledge aforethought stupidity. And this jerk deserves to get run up the (proverbial) yardarm for it.
Simple... (Score:4, Informative)
Simple. Just obfuscate it, and you can pass it around for people to help with formatting issues all you want. I've done that with payroll data plenty of times.
Just two lines or vi commands could have saved this guy so much trouble....
It's not about India, damnit! (Score:3, Insightful)
And Rent-a-coder? Come on... it's looking for trouble when there are thousands of out of work programmers of varying quality and you're asking for the cheapest? Crikey! Programmers working on crap data are getting slammed with soul-stealing NDAs and these wankers are forking off kid's names to some shmuck on a glorified web-board? Again I say outsource the management, keep the programmers.
Rentacoder sure seems slow right now... (Score:5, Insightful)
I looked too... I'm not sure which is worse though - the fact that the prices on the projects are beneath a living wage for me to consider bothering with them (I'd make more as a barista or a dishwasher), or that half of them seem to be helping some dishonest schmuck in a CS class cheat on his assignment so there will be more clueless dorks that can't program their way out of a paper bag holding CS degrees out there applying for jobs.
I'm cool with competing with Indians - for the most part the Indian coders I've met worked their asses off and knew their stuff, even if they might be willing to do it for half the price I'm used to commanding. If I was in their shoes, I suspect I'd do the same. Feeding your family is a good thing....
It's all the people that fill their resumes with keywords for technologies they don't understand and couldn't use if their lives depended on it that clutter up the application inboxes that annoy me. HR departments encourage that behaviour, as do hiring managers that can't tell the difference, but it still pisses me off - both when I end up having to interview such cluebags and show them to the door, and when I'm competing with them for a job.
The Original Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
The primal problem is that the government agency gave the data to their outsourcing provider. That data should have never left the secure area of the government. Once it is out, it is out. It doesn't matter whether it has gone to Gennessee CC or RentaCoder. Posting it on the web is just a matter of degree.
Everybody is ready to hop all over this clueless coder and blame everybody's favorite boogie man of outsourcing. There is a manager back in the government that originally disclosed the data.
Don't tell me about NDCs. The first rule of confidential data is NEED TO KNOW. It would have taken someone 15 minutes to put in some dummy data for the programmer to work with, but they couldn't be bothered. Now that person wants to crucify the programmer.
The programmer who screwed up is only the last (and most visible) in the chain of screw ups.
A phrase that will always live on... (Score:3, Insightful)
Potential coppa violations, too (Score:4, Informative)
In other words, this guy could not only have given a black-eye to the county, but he could even go to jail for it.
If the information lost can be linked to a crime against one of the kids (no matter what age), he better have a good attorney. Gross Negligence and Reckless Endangerment come to mind.
Ewwwwwwwwww (Score:3, Informative)
It's pathetic that they even question whether or not to inform the parents. That's like publicly saying; "Hey, we know we screwed up BIG, we know the media knows, but we're not quite sure if we're going to try and cover our own asses yet or not."
Knowingly endangering a child in any form is a felony. This is simply more proof that allowing the government to act with relative impunity results in criminal acts against citizens. The county is responisble for the leaked information and should be responsible for securing the daily activities of those children, to ensure the leaked data does not allow any harm to come to them.
When I was seven years old, my day-care center had 'accidently' released confidential information about myself and several other children in their care. The day-care center cared for somewhere around 70 children. The leaked information was found in the posession of a convicted child molestor. By the next day, the day-care center was shutdown and the city had filed criminal charges against it's owner and two employees at the facility.
Why is it that when the government does it, everything is not only OK -- but they're not even sure they should bother wasting their time to inform the parents/guardians that their children have been placed at risk.
This bogus trash needs to stop, the government has to be responsible for it's actions. They violate laws on a regular basis as a part of their daily operations. Enron is almost perfect compared to our own government.
That's pitiful.
California SB 1386 (Score:5, Insightful)
http://info.sen.ca.gov/pub/01-02/bill/sen/sb_13
The problem is that the bill is designed for data theft, not for dipshits giving it away for free. Nevertheless, the bill requires that consumers whose data has been stolen be notified through viable means - email, letter, public notice if they can't be identified. Fines to the company for not doing this and the person responsible for the data is open to civil action.
The main problem I see from the article is that the impacted individuals may not be notified, which is just wrong. Granted, this kind of thing probably can't prevented (minimized, yes, stopped, no) but there's a right way to address the problem and a wrong way. At least notify the affected people of what's happened.
US citizens need a Data Protection Act 1998 (Score:3, Insightful)
Like many others I'm down as a Data Controller within the meaning of the Data Protection Act. I take this role very seriously even though I have just a few personal details, but also because I have access to a lot of other records and I view it from the point of view of: what if it was MY personal data that was being copied about ? My declaration also states that any data never leave the EU. Personally I see any data sent to the US as secure as posting it on the Internet. Good to see the actual US government confirming my views.
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Informative)
Just because a programmer is located in the US does not make him or her infallible and capable of doing perfect work.
Re:Hmmm (Score:2)
Before the Indian bashing begins, some of us actually read the article.
Not outsourced overseas (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not outsourced overseas (Score:5, Funny)
True, but if you replace the 'rk' in Mark with 'ndara' and the 'nnis ' in Dennis with 'eptanshu' then you have Mandara Deepthanshu. That, as I am sure you will aggree, sounds Indian to me.
Re:Not outsourced overseas (Score:5, Funny)
Does even outsourced matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether they were outsourced or not outsoured does not matter (IMHO) - they still have a personal moral/ethical judgement... FT government contractors are not great saviours, rather this individual is one with poor/sick ethical judgement (it is in no way 'freedom of speech' to disclose confidential/sensitive information about young kids).
I do not believe outsourcing creates a more or less trustworthy/moral/ethical situations/employees (well, they just have less benefits rights and more legal liability if somethinggoes wrong), it is the individual who makes a better individual and avoids being a piece of scum.
Re:Does even outsourced matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
For 2 years I worked in an outsourcing company doing tech support - and pay rate really writes volumes on why tech support agents really truely don't care about you or your problems (for example they were starting people at 9$/hr to support graphics apps most people get paid 50-150/hr to use). The only goals in companies like this are a) to get customers to go away and b) look for a new job between calls (if you have that luxury). More than once I've seen people fired or repremanded not on just my contract but others for stealing, using, exchanging or sending confidential information to people they probably shouldn't have. Usually its details about the contract, what company uses what vendors for outsourcing, working conditions inside the outsourcing company and confidential knowledgebase/email docs on service and support. Many more times I've seen people take this information without anyone ever paying attention.
To me this is a rampant problem since - the only reason this is on slashdot is because someone noticed.
Re:Does even outsourced matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
It always struck me as ironic that the same people crying the loadest about protecting children, are usualy intrumental in getting them hurt.
Re:Really, this is not OT (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Really, this is not OT (Score:2)
Actually, I'm surprised nobody here has emitted the opinion that the article is biased, puts the emphasis on the outsourcing issue on purpose, and surely is part of an elaborate PR conspiracy to entice US companies to hire local computer companies and stop the bleeding of high-tech jobs away from the US. Perhaps even that the outsourced programmer was paid to leak the information, so that the article could be written.
What would your answer have been if the guy lived in Nowhere, NM?
[/tinfoil
Re:Really, this is not OT (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Pretty dubious site (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Pretty dubious site (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Copyright (Score:3, Interesting)
For the purpose of this I'm going to limit most of this to the information itself in the form of pure text, and won't wade too deeply into the details like the "design" of the database form and fields if it were presented in a GUI format.
There is a grey area where purely factual in