Data Breach/Consumer Protection Bills Advance in Senate

From threatpost.com:

Two separate bills that would require organizations to notify consumers when their personal information has been compromised have made their way out of committee in the Senate, a critical step toward the creation of a national data-breach notification bill.

A variety of technology vendors, consumer advocacy groups and privacy groups have been calling for Congress to pass a comprehensive federal data-breach notification bill for a number of years now. Several bills have been introduced in both the House and the Senate in recent years, but none has made it to the president’s desk yet.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved two different bills, each of which would mandate that organizations that store consumers’ sensitive data notify consumers if that data is breached. Senate bill 139 would require “Federal agencies, and persons engaged in interstate commerce, in possession of data containing sensitive personally identifiable information, to disclose any breach of such information.” The language in the bill is quite similar to that in existing state notification bills, including the landmark California Senate bill 1386.

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Tags: consumer advocacy, consumer protection, national data breach notification bill