Management company threw old leases with Soc numbers into dumpster

[LdiJ]

Nobody ever's made a mistake?

Sure, it could be a mistake, but I doubt that they would go crawling through the dumpster to retrieve the files, based solely on the word of one of the tenants.

I will give you an unrelated example.

The complex where our offices are located have lots of handicap ramps. When they were put in I noticed that the guy doing them was doing them wrong. He was deliberately putting a nice, pretty 1-1 1/2 inch lip on the bottom of each concrete ramp.

I happen to have a brother in law in a wheel chair so I happen to be up on the rules for ramps. I told the guy he was doing it wrong, I told the landlord that they were doing it wrong and I told them what could happen. (people could get dumped out of their chairs) Everybody ignored me.

So, what happened? Several people got dumped out of their chairs. I saw it happen. So again, I reported it to the landlord. Again, I was ignored.

So, I reported the landlord to the local agencies. The wheels apparently run slow, but just last week (two years after they put them in) they tore out the ramps and did them right.

This is a very big landlord that should have known better in the first place.

 

[quincy]

The flip side of this is that unfortunately many small to medium sized businesses are not very aware of the privacy laws that do apply to them nor aware of even the general negligence liability risk they have in failing to have a sound privacy protection system and to ensure that system is followed. Consumers trust businesses to protect their information, but in too many instances the businesses just haven’t really given that issue much serious thought. I agree that news like the Safeway fines and other instances of enforcement action and successful lawsuits can help to alert businesses of their need to implement a sound privacy policy but so far I've not seen a huge shift in awareness among smaller businesses on that front.

This is why media attention is important and why local news organizations will cover the small businesses that are careless with consumers personal information.

The large data breaches are national news but the smaller data breaches are just as important.