Mon, November 14, 2005 — CIO — After a series of data breaches earlier this year, members of the U.S. Congress raged about the irresponsibility of breached companies and introduced a flurry of bills requiring companies to notify affected customers when data is lost.
Nine months after a breach at data broker ChoicePoint Inc. was announced, Congress has debated a handful of bills but no data notification bill has passed either the House of Representatives or the Senate. U.S. companies reported more than 60 data breaches between January and September this year, and Congress, as well as a number of state legislatures, responded with dozens of pieces of legislation, many modeled after a 2003 California law requiring companies to tell affected customers about data breaches.
Despite an outcry over the dozens of data breaches this year, most observers say Congress is unlikely to pass a data breach notification bill until sometime in 2006, partly because of growing concerns that most of the bills would take a step backward from existing state laws. As Congress has focused on other issues late this year, some consumer and privacy groups are in no hurry to see federal data breach notification legislation pass -- at least not most of the legislation introduced in Congress this year.
"They’re driving toward such a weak standard, [legislation] may get stuck," said Gail Hillebrand, senior attorney with Consumers Union, a consumer advocacy group. "If it’s that weak, it should get stuck."
Twenty-one states have now passed some form of a data breach notification bill, including a tough New York law that makes no exception for small data breaches or breaches unlikely to result in identity theft, set to go into effect next month. A "patchwork quilt" of state laws, as some critics have called the multiple laws, has caused some large businesses and trade groups to call for a national law that preempts state laws.
Many of the congressional bills allow breached companies to decide if the breach is likely to lead to identity theft, and thus warrants consumer notification. Consumers Union and privacy advocacy groups such as the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) say companies would have little incentive to report any breach without some government oversight.
"You don’t want the [notification] trigger so subjective that you never report," said Dan Burton, vice president of government affairs for Entrust Inc., a security software vendor.
Backers of such provisions say there’s a danger of consumers becoming numb if they get