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Clear, a company that is in existence to cater to frequent travelers who are willing to give up quite a bit of personal information and pay $100 per year to be able to fast pass those long security lines recently had a nice security scare. One that we can only hope will teach them a good lesson in security.

Clear had recently reported a laptop stolen at the San Francisco Airport, what sounds like a common occurrence in today’s world where it seems just about everyone has a laptop, except this one in particular had the personal information for 33,000 applicants and to make matters worse, the data was not in any way encrypted.

Now the story does have a happy ending in this case, because it appears that the data was never really in the hands of anyone bad. The laptop was originally reported stolen on July 26 and was reported found about a week later. Sadly they are not even sure if the laptop was ever stolen or just misplaced, claiming that when it was found “it was not in an obvious location.“

During that time, Clear had suspended any new enrollments, which was a good step, but a few things here should bring some concern to those who are customers and even those considering becoming a customer.

First off whether it was actually stolen, or even just misplaced is a security issue, you should not be able to misplace a laptop with the personal information of 33,000 people on it.

Second, Verified Identity Pass chief executive Steven Brill was quoted as saying that they do not “believe the security or privacy of these would-be members will be compromised in any way.“ However while the laptop may not contain all personal information such as the social security or credit card numbers, it still has personal information such as names, address, birth dates, and also some driver’s license numbers as well as passport and green card numbers, which could all provide a good starting point for would be identity thieves.

Hopefully the reports are accurate and the laptop was actually just misplaced, and not stolen and later returned, but just in case they are now going to be encrypting the data on the laptop, because according to spokeswoman Allison Beer the unencrypted personal information was “a mistake,“ and one that we can only hope they learn from. Of course whether it was actually just misplaced or actually stolen, the 33,000 people that would be affected are all being notified, this also did not affect any of the current members, just those in the process of becoming members.

Read [CBS5] Via [Boing Boing]

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