The 16-digit account number stored in your card's magnetic stripe zooms across a leased phone line to the merchant's bank, zips under the Pacific to Visa's data center outside Tokyo and rides the Visa network to the data center of your issuing bank in Delaware.

FORBES: Visa's vision

The move comes days after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) censured Argentina for issuing inaccurate economic data.

BBC: Carrefour

LastPass, through its blog and Twitter feed, has been issuing assurances to users that their data is secure.

FORBES: Possible LastPass Data Leak

At the event, Google, Citi, MasterCard, First Data and Sprint introduced Google Wallet and invited additional issuing banks, payment networks, mobile carriers, handset manufacturers, point of sale systems companies and merchants to join the initiative.

ENGADGET: Google Wallet mobile payment service, Google Offers announced

For this to be realized it is essential that the LEI is further developed at an international forum in which the institutional arrangements for issuing and maintaining identifiers and associated reference data and the desired characteristics for a LEI are discussed and agreed upon, including its mandatory use.

FORBES: Global Financial Regulation -- The LEI Looks All-American

After the analysis of data collected by the city but never combined and analyzed, they were issuing vacate orders on more than 70 percent of the buildings they inspected.

FORBES: What's to be Done about Big Data?