Jim Rubenstein of Credit Union Times reports that it’s unlikely that the Texas legislature will pass an ambitious data security bill before the current legislative session ends on June 1.
H.B. 345 and the companion S.B. 327 have support from the financial sector and the state’s Attorney General, but have been strongly opposed by retailers such as the Target chain and Macy’s. One of the provisions in the bill reads:
A business that, in the regular course of business and in connection with an access device, collects sensitive personal information or stores or maintains sensitive personal information in a structured database or unstructured files must comply with payment card industry data security standards.
As part of lobbying for the bill, Buddy Gill, the chief advocacy officer for the Texas Credit Union League, noted that Texas CUs “had to replace over half-a-million cards when hackers broke into computers processing transactions due to lax security.”