On January 17, 2013, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the final omnibus rule that among other things (1) increases patient privacy protections; (2) provides individuals with new rights to receive a copy of their electronic medical record in an electronic form; and (3) provides individuals with the right to … Continue Reading
The Mobile Marketing Association recently unveiled the final version of the Mobile Application Privacy Policy Framework to assist application developers in drafting their mobile application privacy policies.
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There have been a number of class action lawsuits recently filed in California state courts against businesses for allegedly violating California's Shine the Light privacy law.
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Playdom, Inc., an online game company owned by Disney, and Playdom's CEO, Howard Marks, agreed to pay $3 million to settle charges brought by the FTC that they violated COPPA by collecting, using and disclosing the personal information of children under the age of 13 without their parents' prior, verifiable consent. The $3 million settlement is the largest civil penalty ever for a COPPA violation.
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In a handful of cases, including two which were recently decided, companies have been thwarted in various, unexpected ways by the commitments made in their online privacy policies.
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The eight regulatory agencies that released the final model privacy notice form that satisfies the disclosure requirements under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act have released an Online Form Builder to assist financial institutions in meeting their obligations under the act.
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On November 17, 2009, eight federal regulatory agencies released their final model privacy notice form that is intended to make it easier for consumers to understand how financial institutions collect and share information about them.
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The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced on April 28, 2009 that it had fined Centaurus Financial, Inc., of Anaheim, California, $175,000 for Centaurus’s failure to protect confidential customer information. FINRA also required Centaurus to send notifications to affected customers and their brokers, provide one year of credit monitoring at no cost to the affected customers, … Continue Reading
The report by Drs. Alan Levy and Manoj Hastak, Consumer Comprehension of Financial Privacy Notices, uses the results of a mall-intercept study to compare the performance of a prototype financial privacy notice developed by the Kleimann Communication Group ("KCG") during the first phase of the INP against three alternative notices. The Levy-Hastak report, among other things, confirms what proponents of the INP suspected - some GLBA privacy notices are largely ineffective in conveying information to consumers that allows them to make rational decisions about the sharing of their personal financial information.
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