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Portable Storage Devices continue to pose privacy risks for the public sector - media release
Office of the Victorian Privacy Commissioner, Media Release, 30 January 2012. "The Victorian Privacy Commissioner today released the results of the Portable Storage Devices Privacy Survey 2011. The results of the 2011 Portable Storage Devices Privacy Survey, reveal that a disappointing number of organisations have showed no improvement as compared with the 2008 results, the Victorian Privacy Commissioner announced today.
The Victorian Privacy Commissioner, Helen Versey, said the 2011 follow up survey was designed to gauge the degree to which organisations first surveyed in 2008 had improved their management of portable storage devices (PSDs), as well as examine how new devices such as tablets were being managed.
'Seven organisations, including three local councils, still had no documented policies and procedures to control the use of PSDs, despite the fact that I recommended in the first survey report that, at a minimum, organisations require them,' Ms Versey said..."
Further information on Portable Storage Devices continue to pose privacy risks for the public sector - media release
Last updated: 1 February 2012Related Links
- Portable Storage Devices - Privacy Survey - in pdf format (546kb)
- (This document requires the use of Adobe Acrobat Reader). Office of the Victorian Privacy Commissioner, December 2011. "... In 2008 Privacy Victoria undertook a survey into the Victorian Public Sector's use of portable storage devices (PSDs). The survey found that the Victorian Public Sector generally handled PSDs poorly. This potentially posed a serious security risk. One of the most serious issues was the scarcity of meaningful policies to control the use of PSDs in the surveyed organisations. This was specifically addressed with the release of Use of Portable Storage Devices – a guide to policy development in August 2009. This is a follow-up survey, undertaken to gauge the degree to which organisations had improved their management of the use of PSDs. In addition, there has been a series of technological, behavioural and procedural developments which are discussed in turn in this report..."
- Use of Portable Storage Devices - in pdf format (369kb)
- (This document requires the use of Adobe Acrobat Reader). A guide to policy development. Office of the Victorian Privacy Commissioner, Edition 1 – August 2009. "Portable Storage Devices (PSDs) can be extremely useful in the workplace. Their functionality and relatively low cost means that their use is proliferating. But the very nature of PSDs presents significant problems for organisations, especially in relation to data security. They can store whole databases but they are small – so they can easily be lost. Worse, they may be unrecognisable as a PSD that can be brought into the workplace and used to store corporate data. Recently, an advertisement for a well-known brand of sunglasses announced the imminent arrival of glasses that would feature a detachable arm containing a 4GB USB key. This illustrates the difficulty of controlling the use of PSDs. The use of PSDs must be addressed because failure to do so can – and almost certainly will – result in a breach of one or more of the 10 Information Privacy Principles (IPPs) which the Victorian public sector must comply with under the Information Privacy Act 2000 (Vic). Although IPP 4 (Data Security) is an obvious principle relevant to the use of PSDs, others need to be considered such as IPP2 (Use and Disclosure), IPP 3 (Data Quality) and IPP9 (Transborder Data Flows)..."
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