The California Consumer Privacy Act takes effect January 1, 2020. Businesses within the scope of the CCPA are taking steps to prepare, including drafting notices to inform California consumers of their right to opt out of the sale of their personal information. However, California will not be the first state to provide a consumer with the right to opt out of the sale of their personal information. As a result of the recently amended Nevada…

For years now, state laws have required subject organizations to provide notification to affected data subjects and, in some instances, to state agencies, consumer reporting agencies, and the media, when they experience a “breach” of certain categories of information.  And a growing number of states – including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Texas, and, most recently, New York – have gone a step further, requiring subject organizations to develop and implement “reasonable safeguards” to secure…

The California Consumer Privacy Act is almost here! The groundbreaking law takes effect January 1, 2020. Covered businesses and their service providers have already started preparing, as the CCPA continues to evolve since it was introduced. California’s legislative session ended on September 13th, with some final modifications to bills that would amend certain aspects of the CCPA. Unanimously approved in final form, they now move on to California Governor Gavin Newsom for consideration and final…

Last week, the Eleventh Circuit ruled that a single unsolicited text message doesn’t meet the harm requirement necessary to proceed with a Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) claim.   The Eleventh Circuit ruling, Salcedo v. Hanna, reverses a decision by a lower court allowing the plaintiff to move forward with a TCPA claim on grounds that he received an unsolicited text message from his former attorney. “The chirp, buzz, or blink of a cell phone…

In response to trends, heightened public awareness, and a string of large-scale data breaches, states continue to enhance their data breach notification laws. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker recently signed into law an amendment to the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), SB 1624, effective January 1, 2020. PIPA will now require that most “data collectors,” which includes entities that, for any purpose, handle, collect, disseminate, or otherwise deal with nonpublic personal information, notify the State’s Attorney General…

As we have observed here, news reports of security risks, hackings and breaches caused by individuals, terror groups or even countries around the world certainly are important and can be unsettling. But, for many organizations, including healthcare providers and business associates, a significant and perhaps more immediate area of data risk is malicious insiders. On August 29, the Office for Civil Right (OCR) published its 2019 summer cybersecurity newsletter entitled, “Managing Malicious Insider Threats,”…

As businesses prepare for the effective date of the California Consumer Privacy Act, many are conducting data mapping to identify the personal information they collect, who it belongs to, how they use it, with whom they share it and whether they sell or disclose it. The information a business collects from this exercise will set the groundwork for understanding compliance obligations. Given the CCPA’s expansive definition of personal information, it is easy to overlook elements…