A lot of noise has been made of the Choicepoint debacle of last year that exposed the personal records of, at last count, 170,000 individuals in America. What you may not realize is that, for all the attention the incident garnered, it wasn't one of the top breaches of the year, based on the number of records exposed.
The top 5 were all million+ records exposed, including the grand daddy of them all, Card Systems, with 40 million records exposed when hackers penetrated their systems in early 2005. Next in line was Citi Financial, with 3.9 million records lost on a backup tape that never made it to its destination.
You have to go all the way to 15th place to find Choicepoint's relatively miniscule 170,000.
In 2005, there was an average of 3 incidents a week. 52 million records, all told.
And those are just the incidents we know about.