For any company handling personal information (PI), an incident involving unauthorized access of the PI may be a question of when and not if. The question then becomes: what does the company need to do? Having an incident response plan that outlines the roles and responsibilities of company stakeholders, the steps the company will take in response to an incident, and the issues it must consider is essential to re-securing the network, meeting the legal obligations arising out of the incident, and minimizing the monetary and reputational harm to the company. All 50 states have breach notification laws that require businesses to take certain actions in the event of a data breach. While notification laws vary from state to state, most states require notification without unreasonable delay and are starting to impose deadlines as short as 30 days. Meanwhile, the GDPR requires a controller to notify “without undue delay” a data breach to the supervisory authority within 72 hours, and if the breach is likely to pose a “high risk to the rights and freedoms” of individuals, it must also notify the affected individuals.
Continue Reading Incident Response: Have a Plan

With the states taking the lead on privacy (see our tip here), the federal government is starting to get in on the action.

Last week, on January 16, 2019, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio introduced the American Data Dissemination (ADD) Act (S. 142). Recognizing the lack of a single comprehensive federal privacy law, the ADD Act seeks to “provide a national consumer data privacy law that protects both consumers and the innovative capabilities of the internet economy.” It instructs the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to prepare privacy regulations applicable to “covered providers”—i.e., persons who provide a service that uses the internet to collect records containing personally identifiable information—for approval by Congress that are substantially similar to the requirements under the Privacy Act of 1974. Among other things, the FTC would be required to establish criteria for exempting small or newly formed providers, to restrict disclosure of records, and to provide consumers with rights to access and correct their personal data. The ADD Act, if enacted, would preempt the California Consumer Privacy Act (see our CCPA page here) and other state privacy laws, including the recently introduced New York privacy bill, which would establish a privacy bill of rights for New York residents.
Continue Reading Federal Privacy Bills Introduced

There is often an upsurge in hacking and online scams during the holidays, and businesses are not always prepared to respond. Here are five key steps you can take immediately to protect and defend against breaches:…
Continue Reading Is Your Business Prepared for Holiday Hacking?