Privacy in the Silly Season

In Germany there are currently lots of news stories about private data beeing stolen / misused. It started with a set of 17000 that contained information about lottery customers. Next a data protection commissioner bought a CD with information about 6 million people where 4 million dates contained bank account information. There where several thousand cases where money in the range from 50 to 100 Euro was withdrawn from bank accounts. The latest news: a call center with access to the Deutsche Telekom database abused its access rights to steal data. The number of illegal accesses and of stolen data is unknown...

Well, now politicians - you never heard of - voice their concerns and demand stronger punishment and a data protection office demands that the selling of personal identifiable data must be prohibited by law... The government has decided to wait for the investigation to be finished.

It is good that all this is in the news every hour. But we have to wait what actually changes when the politicians and people are back from vacation.

In relation to these stories I try to translate Kim's laymen's laws of identity: Laws of Identity (in German)