Security agency calls for Notworking data to be made safe

INSECURITY EXPERT Giles Hogben has called for stricter controls of social notworking sites, as more businesses begin to use the likes of Facebook and Myspace as corporate tools rather than a time-wasting nuisance.

Hogben told a gathering at the Infosec show in London, that such sites put him in mind of Hotel California.

He explained, although you can cancel your membership of any of the popular social meeting sites any time you wanted, your data may never be deleted.

All of the main players have a returning punters policy whereby, if you do decide you're not too old, limp or boring to pretend to have friends in cyberspace, you should be able to come back and re-enliven your personal space at any time.

In other words, you can check out any time you like... but you can never leave. Twang.

Hogben called for the sites to be encouraged to encrypt personal data so that even those working for the organisation could not access personal information without permission from the owner.

Hogben gave a keynote presentation at the show, on locking down the vulnerabilities in Social Notworking sites, in his capacity as representative of the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA).

He pointed out that, as those huge databases of personal data have been valued at something close to $15 billion, the likelihood of all that data remaining secure was pretty slim. µ