10/03/13
An employee of Minnesota’s Obamacare exchange, MNsure, sent an unencrypted file to the wrong person and left 2,400 people’s private information at the mercy of a nearby insurance agent.One exchange staffer’s simple mistake gave insurance broker Jim Koester access to an Excel document of Social Security numbers, names, addresses and other personal data for whole a list of insurance agents. Luckily for the 2,400, Koester was cooperative — and unnerved.“The more I thought about it, the more troubled I was,” Koester told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “What if this had fallen into the wrong hands? It’s scary. If this is happening now, how can clients of MNsure be confident their data is safe?”
We’ve written about the possibility of fraud, but as with all government endeavors, incompetence and carelessness are at least equal threats. I’ll be damned if I’d put my Social Security number into one of these untested databases today, so it can be handed off to a random navigator without a background check, printed off and left in a public library printer tray, or leaked to a local insurance agent. This is dangerous stuff, and it will happen over and over again.
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