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As we prepare to welcome both the 44th President and a revamped Congress to Washington, it is time to consider what privacy under the new administration will look like. Barack Obama polled strongly on the campaign trail as the candidate most likely to advance individual privacy rights, but are the pollsters a good indicator what privacy will look like under the new administration?    Here are some of our thoughts about what we may see in the next four years.

Following is an updated list of citations to state data breach notification laws. We also note that as of January 1, 2008, California’s data breach notification law, Civil Code § 1798.82, will include “medical information” and “health insurance information” in the definition of personal information. Also, any business “maintained for the purpose of managing medical information” must comply with the prohibitions of California’s Confidentiality of Medical Information Act, effective January 1. These changes were enacted through A.B. 1298, signed by Governor Schwarzenegger on October 14, 2007.

Under legislation recently proposed in California, retailers doing business in the state would be subject to enhanced data destruction requirements, and all businesses would be affected by new data breach notification requirements.  In the wake of the TJX Companies data breach, which may have affected more than 46.2 million credit and debit cards, California Assemblyman Dave Jones introduced revised A.B. 779.  That legislation reiterates that retailers are subject to the same data safeguard requirements as other businesses that maintain customer records or own or license personal information, while significantly truncating the period of time retailers may retain personal information of customers.  The bill also would revise the data breach notification laws applicable to all businesses that own or license personal information.