Antitrust Law Daily Wrap Up, PRIVACY NEWS: Bill directing FTC to regulate data breaches introduced in Senate, (Jan 31, 2014)

By Tom Leithauser,TRDaily

A bill that would direct the Federal Trade Commission to develop “robust but flexible rules” to address data breaches was introduced yesterday in the Senate, its sponsors said.

The Data Security and Breach Notification Act was offered by Senators John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D., W.Va.), chairman of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee; Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence; Mark Pryor (D., Ark.), chairman of the Commerce subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet; and Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), chairman of the Commerce subcommittee on Science and Space. A similar bill (S. 1193) was introduced in the Senate on June 20, 2013.

The proposal is one of several pending bills that aim to create a single national standard for data protection and breach notification.

“The recent string of massive data breaches proves companies need to do more to protect their customers,” Sen. Rockefeller said in a statement. “They should be fighting back against hackers who will do whatever it takes to exploit troves of consumer information.”

“Recent massive data breaches at Target and Neiman Marcus have put the personal information of tens of millions of Americans at risk,” Sen. Feinstein said. “This is a real and growing problem.”

“The breaches are getting more frequent, and members of Congress—of both parties and across different congressional committees—must come together to pass this common-sense plan to protect the American consumer,” she added.

The bill would empower the FTC to write rules requiring businesses that store customers’ personal information “to adopt reasonable security protocols to protect that information from unauthorized access,” the senators said.

It would also require businesses to notify customers of data breaches and would give the private sector incentives “to adopt state-of-the-art technologies that would render consumer electronic data unreadable or unusable in the case of a breach.”

News: ConsumerProtection Privacy