Live, die and lose your job by data

CNET's news.com reports that some goose at Ernst & Young had their laptop stolen leaving the thieves with unencrypted access to personal data on more than 240,000 customers of Hotels.com. This is a customer screw up of the first order. It is also a huge competitive screw up. Online travel retailers live and die on their data - conversion numbers, price competitiveness, product spread, destination growth rates etc. While not underplaying the disaster in giving away customer data, if I was in the Hotels.com analytics group I would be just as concerned about the threat of my competitors finding out key metrics on performance. As for Ernst & Young - what the hell kind of encryption are they not using.