Published on April 11, 2005 at 10:15 PM
A medical practice, the San Jose Medical Group, is sending letters to current and former patients in California after thieves recently stole two office computers.
This is bad news for the 185,000 patients as their personal information might have been compromised because the computers contained names, addresses, Social Security numbers and billing codes that could be used to deduce medical histories.
At this stage it is unclear whether any patients have become victims of identity theft say the police. The medical practice is recommending in a letter to all its' patients that they alert their credit bureaus and monitor their credit reports for a year. According to the Postal Inspection Service, in 2004 in excess of 9.9 million Americans became identity theft victims, costing the country roughly $US5 billion.
California is the only state that requires companies to notify residents when personal data is compromised. Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation in February to require similar disclosures nationwide.
Last October in one of the state's largest security breaches, the University of California, Berkeley campus warned 1.4 million Californians that a problem had exposed the names, addresses, Social Security numbers and birthdays of people who had participated in a state in-home care program.