The newsworthiness of such stories declines by the day. The laptop-filled-with-personal-data theft du jour is from Fidelity Investments. In a report confirmed by Fidelity, a laptop containing personal information (names, SSNs, birthdates, addresses) of approximately 200,000 Hewlett-Packard employees has been stolen last week. A statement by Fidelity specifically indicates that the data had been running on an application with a license which was to expire one day after the theft. Thus, "the scrambled data would be difficult to interpret and generally unusable."

This is an interesting comment by Fidelity - even if the data is really unusable after the software license expires (which Fidelity doesn’t seem to suggest) they seem to put high emphasis on the fact that the thief had only one day to open the software and extract the data - plenty of time if there are no security restrictions such passwords to hack or encryptions to break (which Fidelity does not indicate were present.)