Unfortunately, Your Average Joe's Data Breach

Update: congratulations to the Red Sox!(Good pixs.)

From last week's Boston Globe newspaper:

"Not Your Average Joe's, a Massachusetts restaurant chain, said yesterday that thieves have stolen credit card data belonging to its customers. The Dartmouth-based chain estimated less than 3,500 of the 350,000 customers it served in August and September had their credit card information stolen. The 14-restaurant chain said it is working with the US Secret Service and major credit card companies to determine how the data theft occurred and precisely how many customers were affected."

It constantly amazes me why retail stores and restaurants store consumers' personal data long after the transaction has been completed. This has to stop since it places both the retail establishment and the consumer's personal data at risk.

Retail establishments must face the consequences of poor data security, not pass this responsibility along to banks and credit card issuers. I fear that this situation won't change as long as consumers are happy with replacement credit cards. It forces banks to sue retail establishments to recover the costs of  replacement credit cards after a data breach... or pass the cost along to consumers.

Comments

[David Owczarek]

I was just blogging about the same story and came across your blog (that I have linked to in mine). The gist of my piece is that they still don't know enough about how they were cracked to ensure a safe experience.