CINCINNATI -- Health insurance giant Aetna announced Friday that a CD containing 850 Ohio customers’ personal information, including names, addresses, phone numbers and some Social Security numbers, was lost in the mail in September.
According to a news release from the company, Aetna Signature Administrators had mailed the CD containing member information to another office for archiving. When the envelope arrived at the second office, however, the company said the recipient discovered it was empty.
"We take privacy seriously and sincerely apologize for this incident," said Diane McCammon, director of Aetna’s privacy office, in the news release. "We have taken essential steps to make sure this never happens again."
Those steps include re-training employees on data protection procedures and excising Social Security numbers from future exchanges of data.
In the news release, Aetna wrote that the CD had not yet been recovered but that the company "has no reason to believe the information was, or will be, misused or accessed by any unauthorized individual." Instead, they said, an investigation suggested that the CD was discarded and destroyed by the U.S. Postal Service.
