CVS Corp, a US Drug store chain, has a customer loyalty card called Extracard, which is used to gather information about customer purchases. Companies often use such information for their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. Data is gathered and analyzed to find better ways to serve the customers. In itself, it's a worthy exercise. But it's critical to provide tight security over such data about customers, especially drug store purchases, which can include sensitive items. In the case of CVS, a consumer group found that the data could be easily accessed by anyone who had a card number so CVS had to cut off internet access to the data until they fixed the problem. It's yet another example of the need to make sure that the privacy of customer information is protected with strong security measures. Globetechnology: Security flaw exposes CVS data