ongress knew that the 1999 Gramm-Leach Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act (GLBA) - a law long-sought by the financial industry to encourage the creation of integrated financial services firms -- would exacerbate already-identified financial privacy threats. So Congress incorporated Title V to protect financial privacy, which included the following five key provisions. The most important and most successful is the last: the fail-safe states' rights provision allowing states to enact stronger financial privacy laws.
One
story stands out from those early day in the mid-1990s. An elderly woman from
the Bay Area phoned. She had been mugged in front of her home a few months
earlier, and her purse was stolen. She survived the mugging, and was able to
take care of her stolen credit cards and her checking account. But she
explained that it was far more difficult to deal with the brand new credit
accounts opened in her name.
She
told me that she kept notes on the steps she had needed to take in order to
clean up her credit report. Was I interested in what she had learned?
I
said “yes, of course!” I copied down
each of her steps, added other information from our files and logs – and that
became our first guide on identity theft – a guide that has been updated and
revised dozens of times since.
In adopting the final HIPAA
Privacy Rule (Privacy Rule) in 2003, OCR included a section
outlining a patient’s right to receive an accounting
of protected health information (PHI) disclosures. As adopted,
however, the Privacy Rule includes many exceptions to the kinds of data
that must be included in an accounting, one of which is that an
accounting need not tell patients about disclosures made for treatment,
payment, and healthcare operations.
The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC) appreciates the opportunity to submit the following comments on the online information broker industry to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as part of the agency’s deliberations for the Privacy Roundtables series.
The online information broker industry has come to the forefront of consumer privacy issues in recent years. Information brokers are companies that compile information on individuals via public, semi-public and private records and offer this information via online “lookup” services, often with no questions asked. Some charge a fee while others provide their services at no charge. Consumers who are attempting to limit the availability of their personal information, due to concerns about privacy, safety or identity theft, have lodged numerous complaints against this industry with the PRC over the years.
The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC) appreciates this opportunity to comment on the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS or Department) interim final rules regarding breach notification to individuals in the event of unauthorized use and access of protected health information. The rules, issued in coordination with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), are mandated by Section 13402 of the Health Information Technology for Clinical Health (HITECH) A
Showing 1-10 of 110 results
