Fidelity Investments announced that a laptop belonging to one of its employees had been stolen, and that the laptop contained personal details, including names, addresses, birthdates, SSNs and account details for about 196,000 current and past Hewlett-Packard employees. Including my wife.

While (irresponsibly) understating the risk, Fidelity’s response was to send out a letter with a promo code for Equifax’s credit monitoring service (which Equifax would no doubt have gladly given for free as a marketing program). The letter basically said, well, we screwed up, but it is your problem. Not even any specifics about how they were going to prevent a recurrence.

We now have to monitor our credit and are at major risk for having my wife’s identity stolen by, say, a child pornographer. Too bad, sez Fido. Could be nothing bad will happen, sez Fido. Yeah right.

This kind of occurrence indicates a total failure of any internal controls over data that may exist. They have no business lugging personal data around on laptops that will be stolen, sooner or later. Arrogance and indifference to their customers. I’m out of there.