Privacy Law Blog : Privacy Lawyers & Attorneys : Proskauer Rose Law Firm : CAN-SPAM, FCRA, FACTA

In a unanimous panel opinion issued on January 28, 2008, the Ninth Circuit upheld the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) newly-announced three-factor test for determining whether employer surveillance activity of potential union members is coercive and therefore in violation of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The case, Local Joint Executive Board of Las Vegas et al. v. NLRB, No. 05-75515, -- F.3d --, 2008 WL 216935 (January 8, 2008), involved two incidents of alleged surveillance of union activities at Aladdin Gaming, LLC, in which Aladdin officials conferred with employees in the cafeteria who had been presented with union cards.

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Yesterday, attorneys general from 49 states (all but California’s) and the District of Columbia announced a sweeping agreement with MySpace under which the company will adopt new measures to protect children online. This announcement culminates many months of negotiations between a task force of the attorneys generals led by Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Attorney General and Roy Cooper, the North Carolina Attorney General and is reflective of the intense pressure on web 2.0 sites to protect children online. We previously posted about that pressure, reporting on state attorneys general investigations of MySpace and Facebook here and the subsequent New York attorney general settlement with Facebook here. The new agreement with MySpace is available as an attachment to the press release on the North Carolina Attorney General’s website. 

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On December 18, the FTC announced a settlement in its 15th case (and its first in 13 months) addressing the data security practices of companies handling sensitive consumer information. American United Mortgage Company agreed to pay a $50,000 penalty for failing to implement reasonable safeguards to protect customer information and failing to provide customers with privacy notices.

American United is the first FTC action taken pursuant to the Disposal Rule, promulgated in 2005, of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) of 2003. The complaint filed in the Northern District of Illinois in mid-December, asserted that the Northbrook, Illinois-based mortgage company disposed of several dozen consumers’ personally identifying information by leaving intact hundreds of documents in a nearby unsecured dumpster, in some cases in open trash bags. Indeed, even after the FTC provided written notice to American United that disposal of documents containing consumers’ personal information in this manner created a risk of unauthorized access, "on at least two occasions, additional intact American United documents containing consumers’ personal information were found in and around the same dumpster adjacent to American United’s office."

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Businesses are on notice to pay more attention to computer security in order to protect business assets and private information, and to thwart infiltrations that threaten interconnected computers.  And help is available from the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (“US-CERT”).

Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) Secretary Michael Chertoff and Assistant Secretary of Cybersecurity Greg Garcia recently warned that an uptick in cyber attacks  reveal a growing threat to critical U.S. infrastructure and private networks. Garcia warned that hackers “are making massive efforts to compromise computer systems on a global scale,” a reference to the fifty percent in crease in cyber-attacks between 2006 and 2007.  Chertoff called upon businesses to help protect networks and infrastructure from infiltration and data theft.  Secretary Chertoff remarked, “There's no question this is the vulnerability of the 21st century.” Continue Reading...

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