The Federal Trade Commission today released its annual privacy and security update for 2019, highlighting a record year for enforcement actions aimed at protecting consumer privacy and data security. For example, the Commission levied a $5 billion penalty—the largest consumer privacy penalty ever—against Facebook for violating its 2012 FTC privacy order and imposed new restrictions on the…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Entering the ’20s – A New Era for Data Breach Class Actions?
Paul Karlsgodt, David Carney, Casie Collignon, and Christopher Wiech of BakerHostetler write, in part: …. There remains a dearth of case law surrounding the appropriateness of class certification in litigation arising out of a data breach. The reasons for the lack of authority on the class certification issue include that most data breach cases are…
Anxiety, depression and PTSD: The hidden epidemic of data breaches and cyber crimes
Jessica Guynn reports on the impact of breaches: Mental health professionals say data breaches and other cyber crimes are increasingly taking a heavy psychological toll on the millions of Americans whose personal information is plundered by fraudsters. It’s not just the nightmarish process of clearing your name and credit history or the struggle to get…
PIH sued after notifying patients of phishing attack that could have exposed their protected health information
On January 24, I posted a breach notification from PIH Health with a commentary on how long it took from the time of the phishing attack to notification of almost 200,000 potentially affected patients. There was nothing in their notification, however, that suggested that patients had actually had their protected health information stolen or misused….
Slickwraps Suffered a Massive Data Breach (Updated: Yep)
Kellen writes: Ummm, if you are a Slickwraps customer, you might see an email arrive this morning that claims the company has been hacked. The email might not be lying to you either, as this does not appear to be a promotion or some sort of fun exercise. This may be related to a massive security breach….
Celeb Shout-Out App Cameo Exposes Private Videos and User Data
Joseph Cox reports: Cameo, the increasingly popular app for paying celebrities to record short personal videos, exposed a wealth of user data including email addresses, hashed and salted passwords and phone numbers, and messages via a misconfiguration in its app. The site also has an issue where videos that are supposed to be private are…