Privacy & Cybersecurity

While we're not in the habit of driving traffic to other blogs, it is always a pleasure to point to one of our Mintz family of blogs doing some great work -- the Employment Law Matters blog is hosting  a 2015 Employment Law Issues Tournament to go along with your college basketball brackets.

The draft Data Protection Regulation doesn’t offer many carrots to business – and a recent announcement by the Council of the European Union takes away one of the biggest carrots, the “One-Stop Shop” mechanism.

The third presentation in our popular Wednesday Webinar series is coming up on Wednesday, March 25th. Our presenters, Jonathan Cain and Paul Pelletier,  will offer practical advice about responding to data theft and disclosure by employees and former employees.

State legislatures are not waiting for Congressional action on a national data breach notification standard.

Welcome to March (and in the Northeast, the arrival of meteorological spring is welcome indeed......)
We start this month with a question:  Have you looked at your cyber resilience?

These days most employers manage a vast amount of electronic information about their employees, including the employees’ personal identifying information. But, what obligations do employers have to unionized employees with respect to managing that information and bargaining with them in the event of a breach of their private information?

Our 2015 monthly Privacy Issues Wednesday webinar series continued this month with Jennifer Rubin and Gauri Punjabi's Privacy in the Workplace presentation.

In a recently-released Form 8-K filing announcing fourth quarter and year-end financial results, Target Corporation reported that expenses incurred in 2014 relating to its 2013 data breach totaled over $191 million.

Google made good on the rumors and the company’s subsequent promise last December to create a family-friendly version of its popular YouTube service with its launch on Monday of the YouTube Kids app.

It's another Privacy Monday!
Privacy in the Workplace Webinar

President Obama's February 13 Executive Order, "Promoting Private Sector Cybersecurity Information Sharing" (the "EO"), turns out to be light on new measures to improve cybersecurity, but focused heavily on adjustments to prior Executive Orders implementing the rules for handling classified information. 

The Mintz Levin Privacy & Data Security Team invites you to register and join us at two upcoming events:

Eager to retain its spot among the principal laboratories for domestic privacy legislation, California’s legislature is set to debate Senate Bill 178, legislation restricting state law enforcement agencies from requesting data without a warrant.

The New York State Department of Financial Services (the “Department”) recently released a “Report on Cyber Security in the Insurance Sector” (the “Report”). The Report was released on February 8, 2015,  just four days after Anthem first reported the breach of its database estimated to contain as many as 80 million customer records.

Registration is open for the next installment in the Mintz Levin Privacy & Security Group Wednesday Webinar series --

By now (unless you have been under a snow drift), you have likely heard about the apparent intrusion into a database at the nation's largest health insurer, Anthem, Inc.  Rather than reiterate the facts as currently known (see Anthem's dedicated website for updates), we'll look at the fallout and what's next.

When small and mid-size companies start expanding their apps or web presence into Europe, they need to start thinking about EU data protection laws. It’s tempting to take a look at what one or two of the “big guys” do about EU data protection compliance and think that whatever  the big guys do in Europe must be good enough. 

Don't forget our webinar (rescheduled due to the Blizzard of 2015) on tips to prepare for (and survive) the HIPAA audits that are coming ..

Happy Groundhog Day! While we were recovering from last night's heart-attack Super Bowl 2015,  Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this morning .... predicting 6 more weeks of winter, for an already winter-weary US. #sixmoreweeksofwinter

Last week the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey dismissed, with prejudice, class action claims against Google and Viacom concerning targeted advertising and the online tracking of children through cookies.