Brandon Johnson writes:
On October 6, 2015, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a trio of bills that is intended to clarify key elements of the state’s data-breach notification statute and provide guidance to persons, businesses, and state and local agencies that deal with electronically stored personal information. The bills, which were passed together as a single legislative package, will take effect on January 1, 2016.
Read more about Assembly Bill 964 (A.B. 964), Senate Bill 570 (S.B. 570), and Senate Bill 34 (S.B. 34) on Covington & Burling InsidePrivacy.
This one is interesting:
“Assembly Bill 964 (A.B. 964) clarifies the meaning of the term “encrypted,” which is found throughout California’s data-breach notification statute. Personal information is now deemed properly “encrypted,” as defined in A.B. 964, if it is “rendered unusable, unreadable or indecipherable to an unauthorized person through a security technology or methodology generally accepted in the field of information security.””
It effectively bans the use of home-grown and defective implementations of security methods if you want to take advantage of the “Get out of jail free” card. Because no defective or home-grown method will be generally accepted in this field. 🙂
Weak methods such as the use of SSL, RC4 and TLS 1.0 (all now banned by the IETF) also means people need to get their web sites updated or they could have problems if they claim in their Security and Privacy policies that personal data-in-transit is encrypted.