After years of vigorous debate and numerous bills aimed at incentivizing cyber threat intelligence sharing having failed to become law, on December 18, 2015, President Obama signed an omnibus spending bill containing the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (“CISA”). The statute is located in Title I of Division N of the bill, beginning on […]
Legislation
The EU General Data Protection Regulation – Europe Adopts Single Set of Privacy Rules
On December 15, 2015, following four years of close, sometimes contentious, review, the EU institutions agreed upon the text of the General Data Protection Regulation (the “GDPR”). One of the most important EU legislative initiatives in recent years, the GDPR is also a landmark in privacy regulation worldwide. As from the time the GDPR takes […]
FTC’s Ability to Regulate Data Security Potentially Limited in FTC v. LabMD
A November 13, 2015 decision from the Federal Trade Commission’s Chief Administrative Law Judge, D. Michael Chappell, calls into question FTC enforcement in the data privacy space. The case began when the FTC filed a complaint on August 28, 2013 after an employee of LabMD, a cancer detection laboratory, downloaded peer-to-peer (“P2P”) software that exposed patient […]
Commission Underlines Commitment to Safe Harbor Discussions
In a keynote speech today before the 37th International conference of Privacy and Data Protection Commissioners in Amsterdam, EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourová reiterated the commitment of the European Commission to completing discussions with the United States on a replacement framework for the U.S.-EU Safe Habor. Commissioner Jourová noted that, in the wake of the European Court […]
California Updates Data Breach Notification Statute; Provides Model Notification Form
On October 6, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law two different updates to California’s data breach notification statute. Both updates will become effective on January 1, 2016. The first update, AB 964, defines “encrypted” for purpose of the statute to mean ”rendered unusable, unreadable, or indecipherable to an unauthorized person through a security technology […]