Thursday, 2 March 2017
Wednesday, 22 February 2017
How much is your personal data worth?
I was reading the news when I came across 'Verizon - Yahoo' deal where the former want to buy out core business (flickr, Tumblr etc) of the latter. Some interesting stuff caught my eye and I wanted to share it with readers of this blog. This would be more of a back of envelope calculation and the views expressed are my personal opinion.
So Verizon plans to buy Yahoo (core business), who failed to mention some significant data breaches in the past.
There had been two but I would be talking of the 1 billion record breach in 2013. The records stolen are names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords and, in some cases, encrypted or un-encrypted security questions and answers.
Verizon asked for a $350 Million rebate in the asking price after the breach was revealed to them. This might be a seemingly low figure but according to a Washington Post Article Verizon studied user behavior after the breach and found that number of users leaving Yahoo services were not significant enough to demand a Billion Dollar rebate. The article also states that Verizon would split liabilities with remaining Yahoo business (after sale).
So if we take this figure of $350 Million and double it considering split liabilities, it amounts to $700 Million. Then divide it by 1 Billion which is the number of records breached we get a figure of $0.7 or 70 cents a record.
It is however of a lot more worth to the user of Yahoo whose records were leaked, as these records can be used to wreak a lot of havoc.
So Verizon plans to buy Yahoo (core business), who failed to mention some significant data breaches in the past.
There had been two but I would be talking of the 1 billion record breach in 2013. The records stolen are names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords and, in some cases, encrypted or un-encrypted security questions and answers.
Verizon asked for a $350 Million rebate in the asking price after the breach was revealed to them. This might be a seemingly low figure but according to a Washington Post Article Verizon studied user behavior after the breach and found that number of users leaving Yahoo services were not significant enough to demand a Billion Dollar rebate. The article also states that Verizon would split liabilities with remaining Yahoo business (after sale).
So if we take this figure of $350 Million and double it considering split liabilities, it amounts to $700 Million. Then divide it by 1 Billion which is the number of records breached we get a figure of $0.7 or 70 cents a record.
It is however of a lot more worth to the user of Yahoo whose records were leaked, as these records can be used to wreak a lot of havoc.
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