In a Sunday comic strip in January, Cathy Guisewite summed up the quintessential consumer view of privacy and security in cyberspace. In it, an embarrassed Cathy catalogs all the private information she has disclosed on the Internet. Last May, the Federal Trade Commission made its annual report to Congress about the information practices of online businesses.
Massive awareness leads to change.
And in the case of consumer privacy and security, change is already afoot in the form of forced adherence to privacy and security requirements. IT professionals are already feeling the squeeze of achieving regulatory compliance. Clark is manager of network operations at Thaumaturgix, a managed services provider in New York that hosts servers for medical organizations. They're conducting internal reviews to see where they may need to make improvements. And they're already more disciplined about their information usage, he says.