Activity on Do Not Track is heating up - and the pressure is intensifying as well on a related topic, online security.
Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) has introduced a bill, the Personal Data Protection and Breach Accountability Act of 2011, that punishes companies that store online data for more than 10,000 customers and are proven to have been careless with their customers’ information. In certain cases customers could sue these firms.
"The goal of the proposed law is essentially to hold accountable the companies and entities that store personal information and personal data and to deter data breaches," Senator Blumenthal told the New York Times. "While looking at past data breaches, I’ve been struck with how many are preventable." The bill also calls for companies to follow specific storage guidelines.
Horror Story of the Day
The bill has a good chance of gaining traction - much as the Do Not Track movement has - in Congress, especially as horror stories about privacy breaches continue to circulate. The latest is from Stanford Hospital & Clinics, which is investigating a privacy breach that published the health records of some 20,000 emergency room patients and left them online for a year, Information Week reports.
Email Marketers BewareAt least, from the online ad industry's perspective, this latest calamity didn’t involve an email marketer, such as with the breach at Epsilon earlier this year. That resulted in the theft of an unknown number of customer emails from such firms as Best Buy, Citigroup, Walgreen, and Disney.
Indeed if Blumenthal’s bill does become law, online marketers will be faced with plugging numerous holes that could lead to breaches. Just to name one example outside of email: A pilot by world mobile communications coalition GMSA recently analyzed SMS traffic flows and found spam across all networks, and at levels higher than originally anticipated.
Rakesh prasad
pgdm -3RD SEM
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