All 50 states including the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands has legislation requiring businesses to notify individuals of security breaches when involving personally identifiable information.

With that being said it is important to note that what is considered personally identifiable information varies from state to state. Also in some states reporting is only required if a minimum number of records are breached. Some states are for the privacy of the consumer and other states see punitive damages on companies as more hurting the problem than fixing it.

Two specific states laws have made this disparity even more evident. Ohio’s Data Protection Act and California’s Consumer Privacy Act are on two opposite ends of the fight. Ohio attacks consumers by providing an affirmative defense to class actions when a person’s claims are against an Ohio business. California on the other hand imposed new obligations and potential liabilities on their businesses.

According to Digital security provider Gemalto, 945 data breaches resulted in 4.5 billion data records compromised worldwide in the first half of 2018. This represents an increase of 133 percent in the number of records stolen compared with the same period in 2017.

On September 26, 2018, The Senate Commerce Committee held hearings about safeguarding consumers’ data privacy. At this hearing tech giants said that they would embrace new federal privacy legislation but urged Congress to not model after recent EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. They did seem in favor of a model more like the California’s Consumer Privacy Act.

It remains to be seen whether new federal privacy legislation will be enacted however it is safe to say our personal data is still not any safer.

At Legal Action News, our journalists are dedicated to helping consumers who suffered harm from a data breach. We hold companies accountable for these destructive breaches.

If you received notification that your credit card information, social security number, email address, password/PIN, or other private information was stolen as result of a data breach, we would like to hear from you. Contact us at (718) 218-5594 or send us an email at tips@legalactionnews.com

GOVERNMENT DATA BREACHES

Reports indicate the pentagon failed to secure the the personal information of at least 30,000 U.S. military and civilian personnel. A data breach was discovered on October 4th, 2018 however suspected to have actually occurred months ago. Statement released by the Pentagon verified “the department is continuing to assess the risk of harm and will ensure notifications are made to affected personnel”.

Source of breach was through a third party vendor, due to security reasons, the department is not identifying the vendor. The vendor is still under contract, but the department states they have “taken steps to have the vendor cease performance under its contracts.” Also adding “affected individuals will be informed in the coming days and fraud protection services will be provided to them”

Similarly, in recent months tens of thousands of customers of local governments in various states across the US had their information compromised. In all the breaches one third party vendor is allegedly responsible.

Click2Gov is used by hundreds of Local governments for “self-service bill-pay options for utilities, community development and finance.” Superion-hosted servers for Click2Gov payment processing which was the source of all the recent compromises.

The Click2gov data breaches have impacted customers in

• • • Goodyear, AZ
    • Oceanside, CA
    • Oxnard, CA
    • Thousand Oaks, CA
    • Lake Worth, FL
    • Ormond Beach, FL
    • Okaloosa County, FL
    • Wellington, FL
    • Bossier City, LA
    • Beaumont, TX
    • Fond du Lac, WI
    • And many more…

Local governments have began notifying affected customers.

If your received notification that your information was compromised in this breach and you suffered financial harm, the Investigators at Legal Action News would like to hear from you. Contact us at (718) 218-5594 or send us an email at tips@legalactionnews.com