Let’s say your laptop sustains a minor injury and you decide to take advantage of that expensive extended warranty you purchased. You take it back to where you bought it for repairs, and they give you the standard ball-park figure of how long it’ll take; 2-6 weeks. So far so good, right?

Sure… until a few weeks later when you are informed that your laptop was lost. Although the cost of the hardware can be easily calculated, what value would you attach to the lost data and the personal information that might be floating around on the Internets?

Raelyn Campbell figures $54 million should just about cover it…

From the way things were handled by Best Buy, this doesn’t seem to be the first time a customer’s laptop had been “permanently misplaced.” Perhaps the other victims were content with getting a refund— they might have even been happy since they could put that refund towards buying a brand new shiny computer…

In addition to a shady compensation offer, it seems that some laws were sidestepped as well:

Campbell was informed that she had a bigger problem than a lost computer – the potential for identity theft. She also learned that Best Buy was in violation of the district’s security breach notification law, which requires companies that have lost a consumer’s data to tell them. To date, she has not received that notification.

Although nobody is really expecting a $54 million settlement to be awarded, the extra attention might convince some companies to take the privacy and security of their customers as serious as they take their own.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 9:10 pm by Nick Staples and is filed under data theft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.