Data Privacy Laws

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In the largest piece to come out of the FTC’s new focus on emerging technologies, the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection issued new guidance on the use of artificial intelligence (“AI”) and algorithms. The guidance follows up on a 2018 hearing where the FTC explored AI, algorithms, and predicative analysis.…

The developing coronavirus pandemic affects businesses and personnel within the state and elsewhere.  With more New Yorkers working from home, there are more opportunities for cyberattacks through unsecure remote connections and the public concern growing each day.

The New York SHIELD (“Stop Hacks and Improve Electronic Data Security”) Act was signed to law on July 25, 2019.  It is an amendment to New York’s data breach notification law.  The SHIELD Act provides a number of changes that we reported last year, including expanding the definitions of “private information” and “breach.”  The definition of “private information” now covers emails and passwords or security questions and answers, credit card details, and biometric data among others.  A “breach of the security system” now covers unauthorized access, where such access may have occurred if “the information was viewed, communicated with, used, or altered” without authorization.

With the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), cybersecurity criminals and scammers are ramping up their efforts to target vulnerable employers and workforces. The FTC announced today that since January they have received more than 7,800 fraud complaints from consumers related to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the FTC isn’t slowing down either. Even with the FTC having to change its own procedures due to COVID-19, the FTC has been publishing guidance on COVID-19 scams and also sending out warning letters to sellers of false treatments.

On October 10, 2019, the California Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, announced at a press conference that his office has released proposed implementing regulations for the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”). The text of the proposed regulations is available here.

As background, the CCPA is a California privacy law that seeks to give California consumers the rights to know about and control the personal information that businesses collect about them. For a detailed discussion of the CCPA, please see our previous posts (available here and here).  

Effective tomorrow, October 1, 2019, the existing Nevada Privacy of Information Collected on the Internet from Consumers Act will be amended to include a consumer right to opt out from the sale of personal information and to impose verification requirements on “Operators” covered by the law. The existing law requires such covered entities to post privacy notices. The new consumer opt-out right was added through Senate Bill 220 (“SB 220”), which was signed into law earlier this summer. While this addition to Nevada’s privacy framework draws comparisons to consumer rights afforded under the California Consumer Privacy Act (the “CCPA”), the act, as amended by SB 220, applies to a much narrower category of businesses and is limited to certain types of “Covered Information” that are transferred as part of a “Sale” of data.  

In an effort to give consumers more control over the data businesses collect from and about them, the California legislature passed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in 2018 (and amended it a few months later). The CCPA gives consumers the right to know about and have deleted…

Reflecting the movement to toughen data security laws on a state-by-state basis, on July 25, 2019, Governor Cuomo signed into law the Stop Hacks and Improve Electronic Data Security Act (the “SHIELD Act” or the “Act”). The Act amends New York State’s current data breach notification law, which covers breaches…