Social consequences of the release of sensitive data stored in databases

If your sensitive data is taken by someone it can be a really big problem. You might lose money, privacy and might even be falsely accused for a crime you never committed. As people have become more aware of identity theft, they are realizing the necessity of the protection of their personal information. It is important to protect our information.

Sensitive data are information that adversely affect a person, the national interest and etc through unauthorized access, or modification. Here's a list of some aspects of Sensitive Data:

1.) Social Security number (SSN)
2.) Credit card number or banking information
3.) Tax information
4.) Credit reports
5.) Anything that can be used to facilitate identity theft (e.g., mother's maiden name)

Sensitive data still exist on discarded or second-hand computer hard disk drives. Most of the people are unaware that sensitive data remain in a hard drive and can be easily recovered. It is very easy to get information about a person. When you visit the web sites, all information is in browser’s history. Even if you delete those temporary Internet files, not all of them are deleted completely. For example word processing creates temporary files when you are working on the programs.

When we delete a file, the file is not actually “deleted.” We all know that the file first goes to the Recycle Bin. But even when we delete files in the Recycle Bin, the files still remain in your computer disk. What happens when you delete a file is that the pointers to the file are removed from the space where it is stored on disk becoming reusable.Even if you format the hard drive, the data are still there. If someone is going to take away your sensitive data, all he/she has to do is to take your hard drive and recover all the data. It is that easy to steal the data. We have to be aware that sensitive data can be easily taken away and we had better take some actions to protect our sensitive and personal information.