It may seem paltry next to the $50 million fine McAfee was ordered to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this month for allegedly heavily overstating earnings statements or the $11.2 billion lawsuit against a Florida spammer several weeks ago. But the $15 million in fines is still a lot of money, and the $10 million civil penalty portion of that is the largest single fine in FTC history. In comparison, the state of California last year fined a division of Kaiser Permanente $200,000 for a breach that affected only 150 customers. Some states have fines built into their own data security laws. For example, in Florida, a 2005 law makes companies pay $1,000 for each day they fail to report customer data breaches.
Data breaches like ChoicePoint's and the CardSystems Solutions thievery of 40 million credit card numbers polluted the landscape last year, and the trend has continued anew in January. Earlier this month, UPS lost a tape containing information on 90,000 People's Bank customers in Connecticut. Yesterday, investment advisory house Ameriprise Financial announced that lists containing personal data—including account and Social Security numbers—of 226,000 customers and employees had been stolen in the form of an unencrypted personal laptop.