Privacy and Breach Notices Sent to Customers Affected

My boyfriend just recently got a long, two page letter from a certain company who shall remain nameless, that disclosed that they may have his records, and that someone recently may have had access to his personal and/or financial records, because they were disclosing that they had recently experienced a theft of several laptops which had very sensitive materials on them. The funny thing is, my boyfriend didn’t even think he had ever done business with this particular company, which happens to be a high profile beer distributor, so he wondered when he even would have given this particular company his records to begin with.

These types of letters are a sign of the times in which we live, where highly sensitive data that could lead to our financial ruin is essentially floating out there electronically, and many times is very susceptible to the likes of hackers and na-er do wells who intend to use the information for their personal gain, or for some sort of fraud involving a stolen identitity or maybe even sometimes just to sell your name to lists.

Along with the letter which disclosed the possible breach, he also received another privacy notice, which is the par for the course form that EVERYONE gets now, whether they are signing up for a credit card or just even sometimes signing up for something where none of their personal or financial information is revealed. While these privacy notices were meant to benefit the customer, I can guarantee most people never even read them, and that people don’t even read them when they are accepting or acknowledging their reading online, where they have to sign off on certain things.