JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES
Voices
practices are — reports indicate
that at least one Target employee
raised alarms before Black Friday
last year — and it’s not like there
aren’t a plethora of other companies who would help them if they
don’t have the internal resources.
But updating systems, doing regular
information security checks and focusing on employee training can be
time-consuming and expensive.
But when the costs of any one
data breach are shared by so many
companies and individuals, the cost
of rigorous data security to any one
company might well be more than
what it stands to lose in a given
breach. We see this with the slow
roll-out of more secure chip-andpin cards, which are broadly used
elsewhere in the world but won’t
be widely available in the U.S. until
after 2015: it’s an (increasingly) expensive system to implement, and
no one entity pays enough because
of the fraud the old system encourages to bother going first.
Cybersecurity is fast becoming
a classic market failure: the costs
of protection thus far outweigh
the potential costs of a breach. But
unlike most other classic examples
of market failures — education
and environmental protection, to
name two — the government seem-
ADAM
LEVIN
HUFFINGTON
03.02.14
Cybersecurity is
fast becoming a classic
market failure: the costs
of protection thus far
outweigh the potential
costs of a breach.”
ingly has no appetite to step in
and resolve the market problem
with laws, regulations or even tax
incentives. Instead, they’re stuck
reminding companies how costly a
breach could eventually be.
So the next time you hear about
a data breach, and you wonder
why this keeps happening, just remember that it all comes down to
money: yours (that the criminals
want), and the cold hard cash that
some corporations and institutions
haven’t spent to keep your
information secure.
Adam Levin is a consumer advocate.
A Neiman
Marcus store
in Coral
Gables, Fla.