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Earlier this year, a careless employee at an investment firm learned a painful lesson: Sharing files through peer-to-peer Web sites like LimeWire can easily expose internal data in a corporate network. In this case, the employee worked for Washington-based Wagner Resource Group, which counts several politically connected people, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, among its clients. The employee's actions revealed the personal data of Breyer and the firm's 2,000 or so other clients -- and the breach was not discovered for some six months.

A network intrusion at Advance Auto Parts has put the credit card, debit card and checking account information of up to 56,000 customers in jeopardy. Data security at 14 stores in Georgia, Ohio, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiana, Virginia and New York, has been compromised, according to the auto parts retailer. The security breach is now the subject of a criminal investigation by state and federal agencies. The company is also conducting an internal investigation.

A network intrusion at Advance Auto Parts has put the credit card, debit card and checking account information of up to 56,000 customers in jeopardy. Data security at 14 stores in Georgia, Ohio, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiana, Virginia and New York, has been compromised, according to the auto parts retailer. The security breach is now the subject of a criminal investigation by state and federal agencies. The company is also conducting an internal investigation.

Customers' privacy and their data are two immutable and opposing forces that a company must always try to balance, usually unsuccessfully. Few for-profit firms have proven themselves able to resist the lure of monetizing their customers' and users' data. Some consumer advocates have put up a good fight in keeping such privacy intrusions to a minimum. Still, though, laws outlining the proper use of customer data to protect against identity theft are still, in many cases, stalled in the legislative process, says Kathryn C. Montgomery, a professor at American University.

Oracle's steady march to integrate its string of multimillion-dollar acquisitions continues. Its latest meld is the PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 application with the Oracle Customer Hub, with Fusion middleware serving as the common platform. The end result is a CRM enterprise suite with master data management features, explained Oracle Vice President of MDM Strategy Pascal Laik. Master data management, or MDM, is the CRM industry's answer to the ubiquitous scourge of so-called dirty data.