A recent report indicates that nearly 500,000 individual health records were breached in September 2017. This figure is taken from the 39 healthcare data breaches involving more than 500 records that were reported to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights in September 2017. Healthcare providers suffered the most breaches with
Data Security
SCOTUS Will Not Review CFAA Password Sharing Case
The United State Supreme Court recently denied certiorari in Nosal v. United States, 16-1344, declining to weigh in on the scope of unauthorized access under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”). The Ninth Circuit held in Nosal that David Nosal violated the CFAA by using his past assistant’s password to access his former…
USCIS: Watch Out For I-9 Email Scams
As reported on our Global Immigration Blog, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has issued a notice regarding scam email requests for I-9 information. 
According to USCIS, employers have received scam emails that appear to come from USCIS. These scam emails come from a fraudulent email address (news@uscis.gov) and the body of…
New York AG Announces SHIELD Act
On November 2nd, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announced his proposal of the SHIELD Act – Stop Hacks and Improve Electronic Data Security Act – a bill that would heighten data security requirements for companies and better protect New York residents from data breaches of…
State AGs Argue That Federal Data Security Legislation Should Set Floor, Not Ceiling
The flood of massive data breaches – including, most recently, the Equifax breach that compromised the personal data of around 145 million U.S. consumers – has increased the pressure on Congress to pass sweeping federal data security and breach reporting legislation. While it’s difficult to project whether such legislation will be enacted in the near…
Illinois Nursing Home Faces Employee Class Action Based on State Biometric Privacy Act
An Illinois nursing home is facing a putative class action lawsuit filed by a worker who argues that the facility’s required fingerprint scan for timekeeping poses a threat to their privacy, and violates Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (“BIPA”). From July 2017 to October 2017, at least 26 employment class actions based on the BIPA…
The EU – US Privacy Shield Passed its First Annual Review
The European Commission recently issued an overall positive review in its first annual report on the E.U. – U.S. Privacy Shield (“Privacy Shield”), after evaluating the Privacy Shield in its joint review with the US last month.
The Privacy Shield took effect in August 2016 replacing the EU – US Safeharbor that was invalidated by…
Industry Report calls for National Internet of Things Strategy
A coalition of the Information Technology Industry Council, the Semiconductor Industry Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Technology Engagement Center, Intel, and Samsung, recently released a report that puts out a call for the creation and implementation of a national strategy to invest, innovate and accelerate development and deployment of…
VOTE 2017 – We’re back thanks to you!
We are proud to once again announce that the Workplace Privacy Report has been nominated for The Expert Institute’s Best Legal Blog Competition.
From a field of thousands of nominees, the Workplace Privacy Report has received enough nominations to join one of the largest competitions for legal blog writing online today. If you enjoy the…
And Now, in Recent New York Cybersecurity Action…
New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Department of Financial Services (“DFS”) have been busy on the cybersecurity front. In a press release on September 18, 2017, building upon the state’s pride in its “first-in-the-nation” cybersecurity regulations that were passed earlier this year, (which we previously discussed on our blog and…