New Federal Consumer Data Protection Act Proposed On Thursday

Cnet is reporting on a strict new Consumer Data Protection Act proposed today by Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon.

Senator Wyden has been at the forefront of cybersecurity and privacy issues in the Senate; his new draft bill introduces harsh penalties for companies that violate consumer privacy. The bill would apply to companies with more than $50 million in revenue andpersonal information on more than 1 million people.

Colin Bastable, CEO at Lucy Security:

“This is overdue and we must hope that our politicians don’t make their usual mess of things by loading the legislation with special-interest privileges, pork and point-scoring.  Seventy percent of the US economy is made up of SMB enterprises, so they would presumably fall outside the scope of this proposed legislation: these are the businesses that struggle to afford advanced security technology. They lack the people and the skills to defend their customers’ confidential data from hackers.  Therefore, in addition to legislation, we must encourage all organizations, employees and consumers to prepare for the inevitability of successful attacks – teach, train and test, continuously.”

Pravin Kothari, CEO at CipherCloud:

“A legislative roll-up in the data privacy space is already in play on Capital Hill. Two important pieces of pending legislation, the national Consumer Data Protection Act (CDPA), and the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act (DBPCA) have been introduced in the Senate this year. The CDPA was introduced by Senator Ron Wyden (OR) and brought to the Senate in discussion form just this week. The DBPCA was proposed by Senators Elizabeth Warren (MA) and Mark Warner (VA) earlier this year and continues to gain momentum. The cognoscenti on Capital Hill will tell you that these bills will likely be rolled up as one, most likely before they leave the Senate. Legislation is likely to be omnibus and then will replace the myriad of conflicting state efforts to provide similar legislation. Recent events like the Equifax data breach, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and more have fueled the fire and will enable these to gather substantial support on both sides of the aisle as cybersecurity and data privacy issues remain front and center to everyone’s constituent needs.”

More on the Data Privacy Tsunami

“Beyond both proposed pieces of legislation, the web of cyber data privacy laws continues to grow both in volume and complexity. Two new laws are now effective as of early this month. Colorado expanded a statute on data privacy to add definitions about the type of data to be protected, and a 30-day breach notification, from the time that the company has determined that a breach occurred. New York state’s department of financial services revised a cybersecurity regulation to require risk assessments by application, to require policies that limit the retention of data, and to monitor access to information, and to encrypt all nonpublic (private) information at rest and in transit.

Consider all of this also follows in the much larger wake of the newly enacted General Data Protection Regulation that just went into effect in May, which has huge impact on U.S. businesses, and in the growing shadow of the pending U.S. Cloud Act, the U.S. Encrypt Act, and California’s new Consumer Privacy Act (effective 2020). All of this new regulation sets the bar higher than ever before for U.S. companies. This contributes to the growing common sense mandate for Federal omnibus legislation.”