Fidelity employee's epic dinner results in laptop theft
More news about Fidelity's lost laptop that I talked about last week, which resulted in nearly 200,000 HP employees having their personal information stolen:
It wasn't the case of a Fidelity employee being robbed. The employee in question left the laptop in his car in a restaurant parking lot, while he and some of his colleagues had a three-hour dinner in California. Information Week has more details, which the Wall Street Journal dug up.
ComputerWorld has a round-up of earlier reaction to Fidelity's screw-up, which includes a quote from Fidelity Observer!
Read this post on the Blogger mirror -- Reader comments sometimes appear there that won't show up on this page. You can leave comments on either page, I'll read 'em all!
The Fidelity Report blogger has posted about Fidelity Magellan's massive distribution last week. Read
Fidelity Observer just received this message from a reader, regarding Fidelity Magellan (FMAGX): Read
Seems like Fidelity doesn't really take the security of its customers' data very seriously. Last week, a laptop containing the personal data of nearly 200,000 current and former Hewlett-Packard employees whose retirement accounts are maintained by Fidelity was stolen. Read
The Boston Globe is reporting that Fidelity and Amazon are partnering to sell Fidelity mutual funds through Amazon.com. The details are here. There is also an active Fidelity minisite on Amazon, complete with a Fidelity blog that looks like recycled advice from Fidelity magazine. Read
I think it's interesting to hear more perspectives than the ones that have been spun. CBS MarketWatch's Chuck Jaffe talks about what is truly the problem with this incident.
Wonder how many bottles of wine accompanied that epic dinner? ;-)
Wine Lover: It was actually a Chinese restaurant, according to the WSJ article. Wine was possible, but beer, scorpion bowls or tea more likely.
Investorial, my problem is with Marketwatch, not with you. Read carefully my first response to you -- besides doubting Fidelity's claims and Jaffe's uncritical appraisal of them, I am also skeptical of the "laptop thefts are rare" claim by Chuck's unnamed industry observers, which is why I made the handcuffs ref. Laptop thefts happen all the time -- look at your police blotter, or ask your company's IT department about how often laptops are lost or stolen. It's not a rarity!
Hope I wasn't giving the impression of trying to put up a fight. I'm not... =D I'm just as an observer of media news about finance, I'm always interested in knee-jerk reactions one way or the other. Possibly why I view myself as a contrarian. =)
But have we heard anybody suffering a loss directly because of this incident yet? I'm not suggesting that it takes one identity theft to justify the lynch mob, but it'll be interesting to revisit this story down the road if or when it does. But if it doesn't, no one will remember that nothing did happen.
Hello Investorial, that makes two of us -- I am always reading and reacting to what the mainstream finance media has to say. I refer to the WSJ and Kiplingers all the time, and am generally quite impressed (and appreciative for the blog fodder). Every once in a while, though, there's something in the media that rubs me the wrong way, and that's what Jaffe's piece did this time.
I also concur that its unlikely something will happen with Fidelity's laptop. The theft was probably by some punk looking to make a quick buck and the laptop will be reformatted with a new OS, rather than someone trying to crack the application in question in order to conduct identity theft.
Still, this incident tells me that Fidelity's technical and training policies are seriously flawed -- no responsible company would ever put that sensitive data on a portable computer or storage device without serious encryption. Moreover, no employee entrusted with that data should let it out of his or her immediate person, unless it is adequately secured.
