Senate Introduces Strong Privacy Bill 176
amigoro writes "US Senators introduced a bill that better protects the privacy of citizens' personal information in the face of data security breaches across the country. Key features of the bipartisan legislation include increasing criminal penalties for identity theft involving electronic personal data and making it a crime to intentionally or willfully conceal a security breach involving personal data."
Won't Stop Hackers, Might Scare Hackees (Score:5, Interesting)
But increasing penalties for willfully covering up a data breach may have more effect. As we've seen, bigger breaches cannot be kept secret for long. There are too many ways for them to be ferreted out. Furthermore, the people who would be in a position to conceal a data breach are often people who are more afraid of jail than those who willfully commit crimes like identity theft.
Of course, what I'd really like to see is a death penalty for spammers.
- Greg
I hope the secondary effects ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Key features of the bipartisan legislation include increasing criminal penalties for identity theft involving electronic personal data and
Great. Increase the penalties. That's not really going to deter the criminals, they operate on the thought that they don't get caught.
Also great. How about prohibiting the collection and storage of data that is not necessary for business transactions in the first place ?
One can just hope that companies will think a little more about what and how much data they collect and store.
Make It Cost Prohibitive To Store Too Much PD (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, your company leaks:
1) Addresses
2) SSN
3) Email addresses
That will give you three times the liability of a company that leaks:
1) Address
Make it financially worthwhile for companies to store the absolute minimum PD necessary to operate their business and to create the incentive to delete all unnecessary data at the earliest opportunity.
With storage so cheap and the liability for companies or governments essentially divorced from the actual damage done to personal privacy breaches there is absolutely no reason for any company to store every bit of PD about you on their(insecure) systems.
I don't want a new privacy law... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, Privacy is a right (according to SCOTUS) but currently the right is in limbo. The limits and effects are mercurial and need to be codified.
Also, I'm far more worried about breaches of privacy by the government than by ID thieves. Shore up my Right to Privacy properly and I'll feel a little better about things. Adding sentencing recommendations to ID theft cases is like hate crime statutes. I'm not
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/ [digitalelite.com]
Re:wait a minute, I'm confused (Score:2, Interesting)
Democrats these days favor the Nanny state censor everything method to law and order
The people these days favor whatever party makes them most scared of the consequences of disagreeing
We see a huge swing right with "Fear the boogey man!" and now that we have seen the consequences we are swinging left we are back to "Hell no we won't go!". Whole nation of extremists.
HIPAA for consumer data? (Score:2, Interesting)
HIPAA is a set of rules, with some teeth, that governs how patient medical information must be handled. The banks, credit agencies, etc would squeal like pigs if such legislation were proposed, but I think that's what we really need.