Monthly Archives: February 2011

As we noted back in May, digital copiers have caught the eye of government privacy enforcers.  If you have a digital copier at your business, you should review the FTC’s Copier Data Security: A Guide for Businesses.  In that Guide, the FTC suggests that “your information security plans .  . . should cover the digital copiers your company uses. If the data on your copiers gets into the wrong hands,… More

In a recent article in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the strength of passwords in clinical trials was analyzed. In all cases that were examined, "the recovered passwords were poorly constructed, with names of local locations (e.g., “ottawa”), names of animals (e.g., “cobra”), car brands (e.g., “nissan”), and common number sequences (e.g., “123”)." 

This result comes as no real surprise.  These conclusions build on prior studies … More

Earlier today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued a Notice of Final Determination finding that Cignet Health of Prince George’s County, Md., (Cignet) violated the Privacy Rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). HHS imposed a civil money penalty (CMP) of $4.3 million for the violations, representing what OCR said was "the first CMP issued by the Department for a covered entity’s violations of the HIPAA Privacy Rule." … More

In the recently-released fiscal 2012 budget for HHS, a dirty little secret has been acknowledged:  the Office of Civil Rights does not have the resources to review all reported breaches of health information.  In fact, if you have a breach that impacts up to 499 people, you are unlikely to hear from OCR at all:

Current OCR practice is to validate, post to the HHS website,… More

The Department of Homeland Security has released its latest update to its internal guide to handling personally identifiable information.  The "Handbook for Safeguarding Sensitive PII at DHS" has been around since 2008; even if you do not have direct dealings with DHS, it provides a useful point of comparison for your own policies and procedures.  More

If Tuesday night’s failure to give fast-track approval to an extension of certain surveillance powers under the Patriot Act is any indication, Congress is in the mood to protect individual privacy. As such, a series of anticipated online privacy protection bills are likely to garner bipartisan support in the weeks and months ahead.

Proposals will come from both sides of the aisle. According to Hillicon Valley,… More

I recently attended the 10th Annual Legal and Compliance Forum on Privacy & Security of Consumer and Employee Information in Washington, DC. It featured a particularly lively panel on “Oversight of Third-Parties and Vendors: Managing and Controlling Relationships Through Effective Due Diligence and Contract Negotiation.” Below are some  key points the panelists discussed; some may seem obvious, but they are nevertheless important measures to consider as part of your vendor relationships:

• Be able to terminate the relationship without cause.  …

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I love this quote from a recent Wall Street Journal article:

“There’s no such thing as immunity to identity theft,” says David Lincicum, a staff attorney for the Federal Trade Commission’s division of privacy and identity protection.

It’s a dose of reality for us all — we need to plan for identify theft once it happens, not just  plan to prevent it. More