This afternoon, Senators Leahy, Franken, Warren, Blumenthal, Wyden, and Markey introduced the Consumer Privacy Protection Act of 2015. The bill would place requirements on companies with sensitive consumer information to maintain safeguards to ensure the privacy and security of such data, and to notify consumers when that sensitive data is breached.
The following may be attributed to Charles Duan, staff attorney with Public Knowledge:
“Protection of private consumer information is of paramount importance to members of the public, who are required to disclose information to all sorts of third parties just to conduct the business of daily life. When companies like Target and Home Depot fail to keep secure the personal information of millions of Americans, the public costs are enormous. As a result, we are pleased to see a large coalition of senators taking this issue seriously and introducing a bill that strongly protects the consumer interest in data privacy and security.
“We are particularly glad to see that this bill maintains the pro-consumer privacy and data security protection rules maintained by the Federal Communications Commission. This is a major step forward beyond other data breach bills that numerous groups have criticized for taking away the FCC’s ability to protect highly sensitive consumer information. FCC privacy rules have been the basis for some of the strongest, most effective enforcement actions against major data breaches by companies such as AT&T and Verizon, and we applaud this bill for continuing to let the FCC do its job.
“We look forward to working with lawmakers as this legislation continues to advance.”
Members of the media may contact Communications Director Shiva Stella with inquiries, interview requests, or to join the Public Knowledge press list at shiva@publicknowledge.org or 405-249-9435.