The Real Problem is not always the Breach

An aspect of data breaches that doesn't receive enough attention is timing.

When a company discovers personal information may have been exposed, the clock should start immediately! Unfortunately, many organizations focus on investigating, validating, assessing scope, consulting with attorneys, insurers and forensic firms, all while preparing public statements, yet before informing the very people whose information is at risk.

Identity thieves don't wait for investigations to conclude.

If there is any possibility that highly sensitive data were exposed, affected individuals should be notified as soon as practical.  This should be done even if all of the facts are not yet known. Additional updates can always follow as more information becomes available.

Organizations justify delays by citing the complexity of investigations. While important, people deserve the chance to immediately take action and protect themselves through actions such as freezing credit files, examining their accounts, changing passwords, and generally increasing their awareness of fraud attempts.

These steps are far more effective early rather than months, or even years, later.

There is also a broader issue of accountability.

When organizations collect and store personal information, they assume responsibility for protecting it. That responsibility should not end when a breach occurs. In many cases, the consequences of identity theft lasts for years, while the protections offered to affected individuals last only months.

Transparency builds trust. Delayed notification erodes it.

Perhaps it is time for legislators to strengthen breach notification requirements.

A few ideas worth considering:

• Mandatory disclosure within a defined timeframe once potential exposure of sensitive personal information is identified, rather than allowing indefinite delays while investigations continue.
• Multi-year identity monitoring requirements when Social Security numbers, dates of birth, financial information, or medical information are involved.
• Executive certification that affected individuals were notified promptly and completely.
• Personal liability for knowingly withholding information from affected individuals when there is evidence their information may have been compromised. 
• Meaningful financial penalties for unreasonable notification delays.

The standard should never be "What is the minimum we are legally required to do?"

The standard should be "What would we expect if it were our own information at risk?"

Until laws begin emphasizing transparency and accountability as much as data protection itself, organizations will continue to treat notification as a legal compliance exercise rather than an obligation to the people they serve and those they expect to serve them.

We are past due for equitable accountability measures, especially in this era of "AI."

Reach out to your representatives at all levels, if you agree with any part of this.

Give them your opinion.

Expect a response.

Tao Verse 19

See with Original Purity

Google Finance UX/UI Fail

Google recently upgraded its Finance App to offer a better experience to users. The new desktop interface offers a more expansive layout than the previous look and now includes AI support. However, it fails miserably when considered from a UI/UX perspective. Let's take a look at a few of the problems in each of the three panels in the new format.

The Left Panel

In this left panel, a summary of portfolios displays along with every single item in a watchlist and a section entitled "Equity Sectors."

This panel cannot be resized, minimized, or otherwise closed. Why? Screen real estate is a valuable commodity.

Also, why only Equity Sectors?  Where are the equally important asset classes: Fixed Income, Commodities, Real Estate, Foreign Exchange, and Cash Equivalents? This one piece adds unnecessary noise to the view. It can be collapsed, but only temporarily.

The Center Panel

The default display shows announcements, major indices, the US Market Summary, latest news, dates for upcoming earnings reports, most active stocks, and daily gainers and losers.

Selecting items from a watchlist displays more detailed information about a particular stock in this panel.  Choosing a watchlist expands the left panel, overriding this center panel.  That works nicely.

Portfolio selection does not work the same.  Choosing a portfolio displays the contents of the portfolio and certain details in this center panel.  These detail columns can be customized to add more data to the view as well.  It should probably work the same as watchlist selection though.

When viewing a portfolio with more than 10 market items, it is impossible to view the associated data without continually scrolling back and forth and up and down, while struggling to remember the position of a specific item in a grid with no reference points. A side-to-side scroll bar is available at the bottom, but it is an empty and useless gesture for large portfolios.

The Right Panel

Welcome to the new "Research" Panel, or more accurately described as the introduction and intrusion of AI into your portfolio. 

This panel cannot be resized, minimized, or otherwise pushed out of sight.

The default view is a welcome message encouraging you to ask questions, of which a few random examples are provided. One can also ask it to perform analysis on what is visible in the middle panel or query markets in general. 

In Chrome, with Gemini already available, it is redundant at best.

Tasks can be executed from this panel too. In fact, Google now forces the user to use this panel for any updates to their portfolios. There is no other choice. If the intent is to use this platform to track an investment portfolio, one is stuck using AI.

It is a helpless and useless AI too.  

Most tasks associated with a watchlist are more easily performed from buttons already on screen.

Managing a portfolio using this Research Panel AI offers a new level of frustration. 

One can no longer simply add information to a portfolio as they did before. Google now forces the user to request that AI complete the task, taking the simplest process and pushing it down the path of unnecessary complexity.  What once only took a few keystrokes has been transformed into an argument over trade dates, pricing, and true transaction amounts. 

Who has time for this?

If I have to enter everything into a box, just give me all the fields required and segregated to do that.   At least give me a means of manually editing what Research Panel AI incorrectly positioned so I do not have spend an excessing amount of time arguing with it.

Beyond simple trades that it failed to execute properly, testing uncovered things the Research Panel refused to recognize that standard Gemini identified easily. In one instance, prior to Google pushing the major enhancement enabling users to sort by Ticker, the Research Panel was requested to take the columns from a portfolio presented in the center panel and redisplay the list with only the columns for Ticker and Total Gain/Loss, sorted in Ticker alphabetical order. The Research Panel insisted that the data did not exist. Gemini quickly displayed the requested information without argument.

Additionally, in the conversion to this new build, developers failed to ensure that data migrated correctly.  A lot of users report that daily tracking of their portfolio is lost forever.  Google simply dropped the transaction dates of many portfolio items.  As a consolation, the Research Panel AI recommends that you simply add those back for each and every stock.  It obviously is completely clueless as to the time that could take for large portfolios that have been in place for an extended period, with multiple transactions.

Thanks, Google.  Again, who has time for this?

Final Thoughts

I wish I could say I that I do not understand why Google refuses to enable manually entry as an option.

The answer is all too clear though.

They have spent a lot of money on this, and you will use it, you will like it, and you will work for free helping to train it up.

AI should be an additive tool for deep research or complex queries.  It should not be a mandatory gatekeeper for simple 2-second data entry forms.

Additionally, I will remain forever confused by those who continue to insist that Google is some sort of UI/UX expert.  They are anything but that, and this is one of many glaring examples.

Google did do one thing extremely valuable in this rebuild.  They helped me realize the usefulness of my personal brokerage platform.  Those guys spent serious time and money understanding UX.  The worst thing I encounter there is a login with two-factor authentication every time.

Empty Your Outlook Inbox

Another helpful tech tip for keeping the old Outlook inbox slim and trim, for those that may not know.

Are you using your mailbox as a To-Do List and have 4,563,231 emails and growing?

Stop it now and end your day with an empty inbox, or at least nearly empty.

I do.

All you have to do is flag your email and then archive it out of your sight.

It will still be searchable, and you can assign a due date to it, to remind you that it needs to be done.

What?

Yes.  Just flag them and get rid of them.

Here’s what you do …

In your inbox on each message, you should have the option to “Flag this message.”

It looks like a little flag and turns red when you click it.

Click that flag!

Now, click the little blue checkmark on the left toolbar.  

It says “To Do” when you hover over it.

In the left panel of the new screen, you will see “Flagged email.”

Click it!

When you get a lot of things in here, it will say “Earlier, Today, Tomorrow, A date range, Later, etc…”

Most importantly, you will say a section that says, “No Date.”

Expand it if you need to, using the little “ > “to the left of that title.

Hover over the Item Title and you will see a little “i” that is circled.

Click it!

A panel opens on the right the details of that item and usually shows only the subject of the email and a link to open it.

Here you can add a Due Date, a Reminder, Color Tags, Attachments and your own notes.

Follow this process and each time you flag an email, and you can just archive it out of sight or move it off to a folder.  Do NOT delete the email.  That will delete to To Do.  Archive is in your right-click menu and looks like a little file box.

Hope this helps make your inbox less frightening!  Good Luck!

Now, if only Google offered anything as reasonable integrated.

Google Scrapes the Barrel

Image borrowed from Quartz

Today, the notification below arrived, and immediately thought to myself, "Wow, Google.  You are really scraping the barrel."

---

We are reaching out to notify you of an upcoming update to our storage policies, along with new controls designed to give you more control over your Android backups.

The Policy Update: Effective in 45 days, all data included in your Android device backups will begin counting toward your Google Account storage limit. Photos and videos in Google Photos and MMS data already count toward your Google Account storage today. With this change all other backed-up data such as SMS messages, call history, device settings, and app settings will also count toward your Google Account storage. The storage used by your device backup may increase once this policy takes effect. If your Google Account exceeds its storage limit, your automatic backups will pause until you free up space or upgrade your plan.

New Controls for You: With this change, we are also introducing granular app backup toggles in your Android backup settings. If you are on Android 9 or higher, you can now select exactly which data types and individual apps you want to back up, ensuring you only use storage for what matters most to you.

Your current storage status:

Your estimated increase in Android device backup will be 0.05 GB after this change. 

---

Is all this really necessary? I guess they have to somehow recoup all those billions they are throwing at their AI somehow.

When they actually begin to charge a fair price for cloud storage, perhaps I will change my mind.. Local storage is cheaper and folks should turn away from this nonsense.

Google is just a like a drug dealer.  They give you services for free for years, then about-face and start charging you.  They were not always that way.  The internet was not always this way.