Concealing security breaches where personal consumer information may have been swiped could carry prison time under a pair of proposals that were reintroduced in Congress.
In the Senate, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), ranking member of the same committee, introduced on Feb. 6 a revised version of their Personal Data Privacy Act that was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee last year but died before a floor vote. 数据挖掘研究院
“Today, Americans live in a world where their most sensitive personal information can be accessed and sold to the highest bidder, with just a few keystrokes on a computer, yet our privacy laws haven’t kept pace,” said Sen. Leahy in a statement. 数据挖掘实验室
“This comprehensive bill not only deals with the need to provide Americans with notice when they have been victims of a data breach, but also deals with the underlying problem of lax security and lack of accountability to help prevent data breaches from occurring in the first place,” he said. “Reforms like these are long overdue.”
Sen. Leahy also said the bill can serve as a model for states in enacting laws covering state-kept data. 数据挖掘研究院
The senators first proposed a broader version of the bill in 2005 after reports of high-profile breaches at ChoicePoint and LexisNexis, two major collectors of consumer information.
Since then, breaches at several other firms and within state and federal governments have exposed millions of Americans to identity theft by leaking or losing their personal data, which included names, addresses, and sometimes Social Security numbers. 数据挖掘实验室
According to the Privacy Rights Clearing House, since February 2005, more than 100 million records containing personal information have been subject to some sort of security breach.
Key features of the bipartisan legislation include:
