How to Protect Consumer Data in the Age of Information Sharing

In late 2018, a global hotel chain announced that personal information for as many as 500 million guests may have been compromised in a security breach of its reservation database. The year before, a major U.S. credit reporting agency revealed that 146 million accounts were exposed. Those are the more recent major data breaches that U.S. companies have experienced, but they’re not even the largest—nor the most expensive. Ponemon Institute, which has been measuring the cost of data breaches since 2005, estimates that a breach involving one million records could cost S39.49 million in detection and escalation, post-breach response (including fines), notification, and lost business. At 50 million records, the total cost could be as high as S350 million. In the first 11 months of 2018 alone, there were 1,138 data breaches in the U.S., with more 561 million records exposed.