Blog

Mass Data Protection Law – What does it mean for my company?

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 19:58:00 GMT

I get many questions about 201 CMR 17.00: STANDARDS FOR THE PROTECTION OF PERSONAL INFORMATION OF RESIDENTS OF THE COMMONWEALTH, also know informally as the Mass Data Protection Law. The first question is usually, “does the law apply to me?” and the second is, “what information is considered personal,” and the third is, “am I compliant (and if not, what do I need to do about it).”

To whom does the law apply?

Addressing first the question of who the law applies to; you fall under this law if you or your company “own or license personal information about a resident of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” This means that if you operate in another state, but keep records pertaining to Massachusetts residents, you must comply. The information could be related to employees, clients, prospects, or clients of clients. For example, you perform medical billing for a hospital and as a result you have patient information on file. The patients are not your clients but you are still responsible for the safekeeping of their information.

What types of information are covered under the law?

The law is pretty specific. It says that Personal information is defined as first name and last name or first initial and last name in combination with any one or more of the following data elements:

Social Security number
driver's license number or state-issued identification card number
financial account number, or credit or debit card number

Based on the above definition of personal information, at a bare minimum, chances are your human resources department has information that is covered.

How do I become compliant?

Compliance involves both paper and electronic information. There are several steps involved in becoming compliant. In future posts, I will discuss general as well as specific strategies and recommended actions that will put your firm on the path to compliance.

Facebook Security Tips from NYTimes.com

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 19:51:00 GMT

A nice, short article with easy to follow tips to avoid the worst privacy issues on Facebook. If it seems to daunting, this is a great place to start.

Update from Haiti, and an appeal for help

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 19:53:00 GMT

Here is a brief update on AIDG activities in Haiti.

As a company, Geek Housecalls, Inc. has been supporting AIDG since 2007. They have been on the ground in Haiti for several years so they know how to get things done inexpensively and effectively.

"We have established an operations center in Cap-HaÃ¯tien with our
partner SOIL to serve as a hub for coordinating volunteer efforts and
supplies coming into the country, especially those coming in through
the port of Cap-HaÃ¯tien and the Dominican Republic (one of the few
open routes into Haiti these days). Our presence in the north, away
from the destruction zone, has allowed our communication and logistic
abilities to continue relatively intact, which has been extremely
useful in coordinating efforts on the ground with other partners and
aid groups.

"As an immediate priority, we are recruiting and mobilizing teams of
engineers and other technical experts to directly support relief
efforts of key partners. As I write this, we are preparing to send our
first teams of engineers into Haiti to support the medical response
efforts of Partners in Health, an organization that, as we previously
noted, is having a significant impact here. We are particularly
interested at this moment in placing French or Creole speaking civil
and structural engineers. If you are, or know, an engineer that might
be interested in volunteering in Haiti, please send a resume or CV to
helphaiti@aidg.org .

"AIDG will also be helping to coordinate the distribution of a large
number of cookstoves in affected areas. Even before this week's
disaster, AIDG was in discussions with several leading stove groups
(including Prakti Design, WorldStove, and Trees Water People), and in
fact had been planning to host these groups at a conference in
Cap-HaÃ¯tien next week to strengthen our collaboration in Haiti. Our
focus has obviously shifted in the past couple days, and the group is
now mobilizing very quickly to bring in as many stoves as possible,
while at the same time developing local manufacturing capacity.

"Aside from these immediate response priorities, we are also already
hard at work developing a longer term strategy for supporting
reconstruction efforts in Haiti, including a collaboration with our
friends Architecture for Humanity to promote the development of low
cost earthquake resistant housing. More details on this will follow in
the coming weeks.

"As you can imagine, we have all available hands on deck right now to
support the response in Haiti. But WE NEED YOUR HELP to make sure we
have the resources to continue these efforts. These next weeks are
critical for us and for Haiti, and we are asking you to make a
donation, whatever you can, to support our work here. Every dollar
helps, and every dollar will have an immediate and direct impact in
the wake of this tragedy."

You can make a secure donation online here:

https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=14192

Or if you'd like to mail us a check, you can send it to the following
address:

AIDG

P.O. Box 104

Weston, MA 02493

Here is some AIDG media coverage from this week that you will
find interesting:

AIDG's Catherine Laine, interviewed live from Haiti by Boing Boing's
Xeni Jardin

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/15/haiti-earthquake-upd.html

"Flawed Building Likely a Big Element"

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/world/americas/14construction.html

"Haiti devastation exposes shoddy construction"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8460042.stm

Don't forget to follow us on Twitter to get all the latest updates:
http://twitter.com/aidg

My Revelation about backing up

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:47:00 GMT

I have 2 computers at home, one for work and one for family. The family computer, however, is also used by my wife for her job as a computer programmer which is done 100% from home. Now, being a geek, I don’t worry too much about my home computer. I know how to fix it if it breaks, I have Carbonite on there to back up my critical work and valued family files offsite automatically. I know how to clean up malware, recover data from failed hard drives, reinstall windows, etc.

However, the other day, I realized that my wife and I have customized the home computer so much it would be quite a scramble to get it reconfigured and get us both up to full productivity. Even with my black-belt geek skills it could take weeks to get back to 100%. Therefore, I decided to install a second hard drive and periodically store an entire image of my primary hard drive to it and keep as many versions of the primary hard drive as will fit on the second hard drive. This way, if my computer gets messed up, I can get it back EXACTLY as it was. This is not like system restore, this restores both system state and data, it restores everything and works independently of Windows. I can then get the latest version of data files from Carbonite.

This restore process is quick and painless. The second hard drive and the software to do the images costs about $200, but it is well worth it.

Cobbler's Kids Shoes Syndrome

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:44:00 GMT

IT companies sometimes suffer from the “Cobbler’s Kid’s Shoes Syndrome”. The cobbler never gets around to fixing his kid’s shoes, because he is busy doing his work for pay, and his kids are going around town with embarrassingly worn shoes. Sometimes Geek Officecalls has this problem. Recently, our 3 year old router began to show its age and we had to reboot it a lot and sometimes it took several reboots to get it to work. So, this week, I installed a new router. I’d like to share with you some of the awesome benefits of this router (which wasn’t hideously expensive).

The most exciting thing about our new router is that it lets us use two internet connections. When we first started in this location we had internet through cable. Later, we got a T1 line. We kept the cable line as a backup. So when I got a new router I wanted something that would let us failover from one line to another automatically. For under $1000 I got a business class router that not only fails over automatically, but balances our internet load between the 2 connections. This has sped up our internet dramatically and given us much better reliability that is so crucial to a small business.

I’ve observed that many of our customers are becoming more and more dependent on web-based applications such as e-mail, customer databases (salesforce.com and others) and web-based meetings and collaboration. Internet outages are becoming one of the more annoying issues facing small businesses. Having 2 ISPs with a router like this may be something for a small business to consider these days. For less than $1000 for the router and $200/month for both a cable and dsl connection you could have this capability. I’d love to hear thoughts on this from small business owners !

Security of Cloud Computing

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 20:48:00 GMT

This article caught my attention recently. Google Apps experienced a security breach.

The reason this is interesting to us is that we have many customers who don’t have servers. These customers use many aspects of Cloud Computing (of which Google Apps is one). Some customers use Salesforce.com or Hosted Exchange – all examples of cloud computing. A way to easily share documents in the cloud inexpensively and letting Google or another cloud provider worry about backups and uptime is tempting. Most businesses have not gone this way at this time. Anyway, it is something to watch. I suspect it will begin to catch on as the internet gets more reliable. In fact I recently posted an entry about having 2 internect connections in a small business – Cobbler’s Kids Shoes Syndrome.

I’d love to hear from others on their experience with cloud computing – particularly with file sharing/collaborating.