Customer Data May be Too Risky to Keep  By Dan Gillmor  | 
Posted 09-05-2005 Print Email With data security an oxymoron at
many companies, it's time to rethink who controls customer data
in the first place.  Companies keep finding ways to misplace
consumers' personal data. Courier services lose tapes on their
way to long-term storage facilities; malevolent social engineers
con their way into access; laptop computers holding multiple
databases are stolen.  We hear a lot about these kinds of things
now because a new California law requires companies to disclose
to consumers when their data has been compromised. It should be
obvious, though, that data loss has been happening for some
time, because the level of security in these cases seems to have
been, at best, pervasively inadequate.  All of which makes me
wonder: Why are companies keeping our data at all? Wouldn't
they—and we—be better off in the long run if data wasn't
collected and stored in the first place?  This sounds
counterintuitive, and it certainly g