I didn’t read through the Massachusetts 2011 Report on Data Breach Notifications [PDF] until recently, but once I went through the report my brain kept telling me “something is wrong”. Not something earth shattering, but more of a “something is off” signal. This happens more than I’d like as I tend to constantly background process what I intake visually.
As Twitter followers may lament, I have been known to transcribe useful tabular information from reports such as these, especially when I need to communicate them internally and I have done so with this report [gdocs] as well.
After working through the whole document, the last page of data is where I found the “off by one” error (see figure below). Someone performed “head math” vs copying & formatting from a spreadsheet. Never a good idea if you aren’t going to double-check the report thoroughly.
My transcription (“Lost Stolen Misplaced” tab in the aforelinked workbook) assumes the “5” and “48” are correct and has the correct total (“53”). One of the problems when an error like this crops up is that you do not know where the error occurred, but since the sums of “12” and “277” are both correct in the spreadsheet and in the report, I think I’ve found the culprit. Unfortunately, a computational error such as this does foster suspicion on the accuracy of the rest of the report data.
It’s a lesson report writers should heed well: compute twice, publish once. Errant data can cut as deeply as a saw blade.
While I Have Your Attention
Since there aren’t many visualizations in Massachusetts 2011 Report on Data Breach Notifications (3D numbers do not count), here are a few I made that I found helpful during my interpretation (2011 data unless otherwise specified):
