Ryan Bridge: There should be instant fines for loss of data

Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

Yesterday was a bad day for some of my pet peeves.

I couldn't find a carpark in town, I had to visit a supermarket, and Qantas suffered a data hack.

Nothing drives me more crazy than a business —big or small, although in this case very big— asking too many personal questions and getting too many personal details about their customers.

Unnecessarily so.

Now. There's a good argument for why Qantas needs your details - if you're flying then they require your passport number, your date of birth, your addresses in case things go wrong, etc.

I get that. But if they are collecting such sensitive information —our secrets and the secret to our identity— then can they not keep it safe?

No, they can't.

Yesterday, 6 million Qantas customers had names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdates, and frequent flyer numbers stolen.

They reckon no credit card data was taken.

But honestly, who cares? The information that was taken is bad enough.

And what will they do? Apologise, send a letter, and then move on till it happens again.

We should have instant and aggressive fines. Once your private data is hacked from your third-party customer service centre, there's no getting it back.

It can and will be used, sold on the black-market to gangs of losers wanting to rip you off.

They've opened a can of worms.

The sooner these guys get properly punished for being so cavalier with our information, the sooner it stop it getting stolen.

And then they might also start asking themselves whether they really need our data in the first place.

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