Looking to beat the end of the year enforcement deadline, the Senate (on November 30, 2010) and the House (on December 7, 2010) have now both voted to pass a law that would limit the scope of the FTC’s Red Flags regulations.  Although the ABA lawsuit seeking to exempt lawyers from the scope of these regulations is on [...]

In a recent National Law Journal article, Adrian Dayton argues that smaller law firms have been much better at jockeying for online positioning and expanding their digital footprint.  Driven by the ultimate goal of search engine optimization (SEO), these firms have been using blogs, FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn to get noticed in ways the largest firms are not.  As pointed out [...]

It’s been six months since passage of the administration’s healthcare reform act — the Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act (PPACA).   As reported in newspapers around the country, that means that for those health plans that begin today:  Parents will be able to keep their young adult children on their group health plan up to [...]

A growing list of technolgy vendor settlements should be a wake up call to tech vendors both large and small.   For example, last month, HP resolved a legacy EDP lawsuit to the tune of $460 million.  The facts of the case are not very complicated.  A decade ago, British firm BSkyB retained EDS to provide a CRM system for BSkyB’s help [...]

Claims arising out of internally-used software continue to be a significant retained IT risk factor.  When President Obama picked the Business Software Alliance’s General Counsel Neil MacBride for a senior Justice Department post, it was a clear message that we will see increased software compliance audits – and possible new penalties.  The increasing use of [...]

Taking advantage of a federal law passed last year, Connecticut’s Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal, announced yesterday a settlement with HMO Health Net that includes a corrective action plan, a $250,000 payment to the State of Connecticut (with an additional potential pot of $500,000), and increased credit monitoring and ID theft insurance to potential victims.  According [...]

A New Jersey Appellate Division panel ruled on June 23, 2010 that principals of a company can be found personally liable under New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act (CFA) even without actual knowledge about alleged unlawful practices sufficient to pierce the corporate veil.   As well, the court ruled that there was no need to prove intent before triggering the [...]

In the recently published Symantec survey of 2,500 executives with responsibility for IT security – half from companies of less than 100 employees – cyber-attacks were ranked as their top business risk.  And, of those polled by Symantec, 74 percent said they were “somewhat or extremely concerned” about losing sensitive electronic data.  In fact, 42 percent lost confidential [...]

It what has come to be a now common event, the FTC has decided to extend again the enforcement of its Red Flags Regulations.  Succumbing to Congressional pressure, the FTC has decided to extend the prior deadline – which was last slated for June 1, 2010 – until December 31, 2010.   Most privacy professionals have [...]

It has been over two years since the grocery chain Hannaford Brothers announced a breach of its network security that exposed over 4 million credit card numbers and led to 1,800 cases of fraud.   In fact, a quick review of the Privacy Clearinghouse’s Chronology of Data Breaches shows that Hannaford is not the only supermarket chain to have [...]