Beyond Media Hype: Empirical Analysis of Disclosed Privacy Breaches 2005-2006 and a DataSet/Database Foundation for Future Work

A welcome but unintended consequence of recent state disclosure laws in the U.S. (most notably California SB 1386), has been a continuous stream of privacy breaches reported in the mass media. In this paper, we provide empirical analysis of disclosed breaches for the period of 2005-2006 to better understand what is happening in aggregate (overall patterns and trends) beyond the often sensational individual cases reported in the media. By processing raw data from the best available sources, we have created an Internet-accessible database that can be queried for breach statistics and a data set that can be shared so that our analysis can be validated, as well as enable future analysis by other researchers. The statistical analysis we report here is a first step toward answering the important and complex questions of why privacy breaches are occurring and what may be the best practices to prevent and mitigate their effects. Policy formulation to address privacy breaches is already in process at the organization, state, and national levels largely driven by mass media coverage – it is our hope decision-makers take the empirical evidence we report here into consideration.