Lawmakers Weigh Parental Notification Changes
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RICHMOND -- After last spring's shooting at Virginia Tech, the extent of the confusion over federal privacy laws at college campuses became obvious.
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Letters Readers drive stake through parents' group
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Lawmakers say they want to know whether a Veterans Affairs employee was being unfairly blamed for losing veterans&#039; personal information, citing newly disclosed documents showing he had received permission to work on the data from home.
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Social networking sites too Social networking sites and message boards face the same regulatory burden as internet service providers (ISPs) in a new bill proposed by ex-US presidential candidate John McCain. McCain wants sites to report all child pornography to authorities.â¦
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A memo sent last week by the While House Office of Management and Budget gives federal agencies 120 days to develop and implement security notification policies, and to start planning to reduce or eliminate the unnecessary use of Social Security numbers and similar personal data.
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No doubt, parenting has changed in the Internet Age, and a new study tries to reveal how mom and dad are dealing with it.
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By Melissa Vargas Sanchez, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas  Sep. 24--Making sure your kids are staying safe in cyberspace just got a little less tedious.   Many parents and grandparents of teens are mystified when it comes to things like friends lists, comment sections and blogs.
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(InfoWorld) - Members of the U.S. Congress introduced a flurry of new technology-related bills this week, including two bills that would require companies with data breaches to notify affected customers. Senators Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, and Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, introduced the Personal Data Privacy and Security Act. In addition to requiring data breach notification, the bill would also require data brokers to disclose what information they hold on individuals. The bill would allow individuals to correct information held by data brokers, and it would require companies that have databases with personal information on more than 10,000 U.S. residents to implement data privacy and security programs. Representatives Bobby Rush, a Illinois Democrat, and Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican, introduced the Data Accountability and Trust Act this week. Their bill, with 24 co-sponsors, authorizes the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to draw up data privacy requirements for businesses, including requirements that they have vulnerability assessments and policies for disposing of obsolete data. After a company reports a data breach, the FTC would conduct an audit of its security practices, and, like the Leahy-Sanders bill, the bill would require data brokers to disclose the information they hold on individuals and allow individuals to correct wrong information. Organizations have lost 100 million personal records belonging to U.S. residents in data breaches since 2005, Leahy said in a speech on the Senate floor. Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, singled outÂ data breaches at the U.S. Department of Veterans AffairsÂ last May andÂ retailer The TJX Companies,Â announced in January, in his speech. "These data security breaches are compelling examples of why we need strong federal data privacy and security laws to protect Americansâ personal data and to address the ills of lax data security," he said. "In the information age, any company that wants to be trusted by the public must earn that trust by vigilantly protecting the databases they use and maintain." Members of Congress introduced about a dozen bills requiring data breach notification after a series of breaches in early 2005, but legislation stalled largely over committee jurisdictional wrangling. About 30 states have passed breach notification laws, most of them since 2005. The Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a trade group of IT security vendors, in January called on Congress to pass a comprehensive data protection bill, including breach notification. But some groups, including conservative think tank the Progress and Freedom Foundation, have questioned the need for a breach notification law, saying the cost to businesses may far outweigh the benefits to consumers. Other tech-related bills introduced this week: -- Two bills allowing the FTC toÂ investigate the practice of pretexting, when an investigator assumes a false identity to gain access to a person's telephone records. President George Bush signed a bill creating penalties for pretexting in January, but the two new bills would give the FTC the authority to investigate and prosecute pretexters. Many lawmakers became interested in the issue afterÂ Hewlett-Packard disclosedÂ in September that investigators it had hired used pretexting in an attempt to gain access to board members' and reporters' phone records. -- A bill targeted at spyware by establishing criminal penalties for a number of actions. The bill would prohibit keystroke logging, taking control of a computer without the user's consent, diverting Web browsers, using computers to create botnets and modifying a computer users' browser and security settings without permission. Two spyware bills passed the House of Representatives by overwhelming majorities in March 2005, but the Senate didn't act on them. Â
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State lawmakers want to revise Pennsylvania's "cyberschool" law following a dispute over taxpayer money spent on the children of U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum.
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A bill introduced last week could prohibit Venezuelan parents from bestowing names like Hengelberth, Maolenin, Githanjaly and Yurbiladyberth on their children.
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Members of the U.S. Congress introduced a flurry of new technology-related bills this week, including two bills that would require companies with data breaches to notify affected customers.
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House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert has asked the Justice Department to cast a wide net in its investigation of lewd e-mails sent by a Republican legislator to young pages, even looking into whether other lawmakers learned of them and failed to notify authorities. But legal experts said yesterday that...
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The support from the pair means that it will be up to the Legislature to decide whether to block proposed changes.
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By Vicky Eckenrode< Morris News Service  ATLANTA - A state senator wants parents to have monitoring privileges and the ability to restrict the access of their children to social networking  Web sites such as MySpace.com and Facebook.com.  Sen.
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New laws on the use of child car seats have come into force but many parents will be caught out, Which? warns.
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By Tiffany Erickson Deseret Morning News  Friday the House approved a bill that would tweak the new private school voucher law known as the Parents for Choice in Education Act.
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Four California legislators want the the state's Department of Social Services to take more aggressive steps in notifying 1.4 million residents that their personal information may have been stolen by hackers.