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A joint hearing was held yesterday by two subcommittees of the House Energy & Commerce Committee the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection and the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet. The hearing was on the topic of, “Exploring the Offline and Online Collection and Use of Consumer Information.”
The testimony and statements by members of the subcommittees were largely targeting how advertisers obtain and use consumer information. Representative Rick Boucher (D-VA), Chairman of the Communications, Technology and the Internet Subcommittee, has been interested in this topic for some time and is preparing legislation to provide a mechanism for consumers to control how some of the information on buying habits and other commercial data may be used.
Witnesses, including Chris Hoofnagle, cited instances of databases that collect health information (outside of HIPPA) and unlisted phone numbers. A specific Merlin list of phone information was cited. Chairman Boucher intends to introduce legislation in the next several weeks, so we’ll have to review it at that time. In the past, Boucher has suggested using only a light hand to regulate so as not to stifle business, and I recall he suggested opt-out for some issues. One suggestion made by Hoofnagle was to have a time limit on how long data can be maintained.
Here’s a link to the testimony.
http://energycommerce.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1829:exploring-the-offline-and-online-collection-and-use-of-consumer-information&catid=129:subcommittee-on-commerce-trade-and-consumer-protection&Itemid=70
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Health care organizations can self-assess whether a technology snafu needs to be disclosed.
Physicians won’t have to notify patients of every breach of privacy regarding their records, under a rule finalized by the Dept. of Health and Human Services.
A provision in the Breach Notification for Unsecured Protected Health Information rule allows health care organizations to self-assess the level of potential harm when a breach occurs and determine whether notification is warranted. Originally the rule indicated physicians and hospitals would have to notify patients of any kind of privacy breach, regardless of whether it caused harm.
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POMONA, Calif.—Cal Poly Pomona says personal information for hundreds of student applicants was made available on the Internet for five years.University officials say Social Security numbers, home addresses and other information for as many as 355 applicants were inadvertently left in a publicly accessible computer folder from 2003 until November 2008.
A former applicant found the mistake while searching for information on himself.
The school says even after the data was removed from a university server, some of it remained available through Google until a few months ago.
Last week, the school contacted Google to purge the information and sent letters to the applicants, urging them to contact credit reporting agencies.
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The United Nations is drawing fire after disrupting a meeting of rights activists at its internet governance convention in Egypt.
Over the weekend, UN officials asked organizers of a book reception at the Internet Governance Forum to remove a poster for a book, which mentioned censorship and the Great Firewall of China. The organizers, a group of activists known as the OpenNet Initiative, were told the poster had to be removed because of objections from a member state.
Ronald Deibert, co-founder of the OpenNet Initiative and director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, said the UN was being hypocritical by demanding the poster’s removal.
“If we cannot discuss issues of internet censorship, surveillance, and privacy at a UN forum on internet governance, then what is the point of the Internet Governance Forum?” he said.
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