Fidelity grilled, toasted over stolen HP data

THE FALLOUT continues to continue over a notebook stolen two weeks ago from Fidelity which contained confidential data relating to 196,000 employees of the former HP empire.

We continue to receive letters from outraged former and ex-employees asking exactly why, how, and where Fidelity managed to lose such a notebook.

The Wall Street Journal winkled out some of these details yesterday. It said an unnamed employee left the notebook - brand unspecified - in a rental car - brand also unspecified, while he had nosh in a Palo Alto Chinese eateria. Name of restaurant also unspecifified.

But the local cops told the Journal there's been a string of thefts of notebooks in the area close to HP's Palo Alto HQ and maybe the crooks were after the machine rather than what was in it.

What was in it, however, is pre-occupying the owner of a blog, here, who asked a Fidelity employee the famous Five Ws - that is to say where, when, what, why and who.

According to the blog, Fidelity seemed reluctant to answer many of his questions, and instead repeated a long mantram over and over and over again. Say it 100,000 times and hope the human being goes away?

No large corporation wants to give away its internal trade secrets, and as the employee, according to the Journal, reported the theft immediately he found out his car had been broken into, we suspect the corporation implemented a way of stopping any information being accessed on that PC.

But, as the blog and other of our readers affected have pointed out, just why was all that data being held on a notebook anyway? µ

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