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Laptop theft may have jeopardized employee data(Newsday (Melville, NY) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Jun. 5--The parent company of subsidiaries including Stop & Shop has sent out letters to notify some of its former employees that their personal information may have been on a laptop that was stolen last month. A statement released by Stop & Shop supermarkets contained few details about the theft but did say that the laptop computer was in the hands of an employee of an outside vendor that provides data processing services for the pension plan of the parent company, Ahold USA. The statement did not say how many employees were affected. An Ahold letter received by one former employee Thursday offered a slightly different narrative, saying that the vendor lost the laptop computer from baggage checked on a May 2 domestic commercial flight. The letter said that data in a file on the laptop are used to determine eligibility in the company-sponsored pension plan, and the file contained the former employees' names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, benefit amounts and other "related information. No financial account or medical benefits information was in the file." The letter, dated May 24, said "the incident was immediately reported to the airline and subsequently the police," adding that there was no indication that the information was being misused. The laptop was protected by a password, but there were no additional protections for the file itself. The company has set up a help line at 888-869-3777 to help former employees with questions, and the letter provides instructions on how former employees can place a fraud alert on their credit files for free. Ahold USA's missing laptop is just one of many incidents in which sensitive information has been compromised. It was recently revealed that the personal information of 17,000 Medicare beneficiaries had been left on a hotel computer after an employee of insurance company Humana Inc. called up the data through a hotel computer and then did not delete the file. Last month, it was reported that the electronic records of 26.5 million U.S. military veterans were stolen from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs analyst. And in late April, past and present Long Island Rail Road employees received letters notifying them that data tapes containing their personal information had been lost during a routine delivery to a storage site. The Associated Press contributed to this story. |