From the Telegraph. This would never had got through in Bill Deedes’s day.
Daily Archives: July 8, 2008
Daily Mail loses personal data on employees
Well, well. According to this report, the Voice of Middle England isn’t too careful about keeping sensitive data secure.
Northcliffe Media, owner of the Daily Mail, is the latest company to lose a laptop load of sensitive staff information.
A laptop containing names, addresses, bank accounts and sort codes of Mail and General Trust staff has been stolen, it emerged last week. The company told staff that the laptop was password protected – and so, presumably, not encrypted.
The company confirmed to The Register that the theft had occurred and that staff had been informed. Police and the Information Commissioner were also informed.
According to the letter from Northcliffe Media sent to staff, and seen by the Reg, staff were advised to contact their bank to warn them of potential problems.
The letter, signed by group finance director M J Hindley, said:
The likelihood is that this theft was carried out in an opportunistic manner by a thief who will not realise that there is any personal data on the laptop and who may just erase what is on the hard disk in order to disguise the fact that the laptop is stolen.
I can assure you that we take security of personal data very seriously and have, since this incident, which was inadvertently caused by a technical issue, already further strengthened procedures.
The company apologised for any inconvenience or annoyance caused by the theft.
I bet this won’t stop the Mail castigating the government for its casual attitude towards data security.
So how much is FaceBook ‘worth’?
From the Sydney Morning Herald…
THERE has been speculation recently about what is being called an internal Facebook valuation – a value the company has assigned to its own common stock that is drastically lower than the $15 billion valuation set so publicly last year by Microsoft’s investment.
According to the transcript of a June 13 case-management conference in the lawsuit settled last week between Facebook and ConnectU – one of the few documents in the case not under seal – that figure is $3.75 billion, or one-quarter of the Microsoft valuation.
ConnectU had claimed that Mark Zuckerberg, a former employee and Facebook’s founder, got his idea from ConnectU.
The relevant passage from the document, under the section titled Defendant ConnectU’s Position, said: “The term sheet and settlement agreement is also unenforceable because it was procured by Facebook’s fraud. Indeed, based on a formal valuation resolution approved by Facebook’s board of directors but concealed from ConnectU, the stock portion of the purported agreement is worth only one-quarter of its apparent value based on Facebook’s public press releases.”
The piece goes on to point out that Microsoft bought preferred stock — i.e. ones with special voting rights, so the ConnectU figure is probably too low. But it’s still not $15 billion.
Leave your 3G dongle at home
From today’s Register.
Another jet-setting TV addict has fallen foul of unreasonable roaming fees, this time to the tune of £31,500, just to get their TV fix – just as the EU considers how best to curtail the operators’ roaming rates.
The chap concerned was on holiday in Portugal when he decided to forgo the local sights and download an episode of the TV drama Prison Break, along with a few music tracks, and was stunned to get a bill for £31,500 on his return.
The connection was with Yes Telecom, the small-business arm of Vodafone. While we might deride someone who failed to read the small print on their contract, 30 grand does seem a high price to pay for a bit of telly.
The chap, identified by the Manchester Evening News as Iayn Dobson, 34, contested the bill and Vodafone eventually agreed to settle for £229 – the amount Mr Dobson would have had to pay to use the same quantity of data at home…