Barack Obama will push Congress to pass a law requiring companies that are victims of data breaches to notify affected consumers within 30 days and a second law that gives consumers more control over their digital data.
Obama will call for a national data breach notification law and a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights in ID theft and privacy initiatives in his State of the Union speech Jan. 20, said PC World.
More than 45 states have their own data breach notification laws, but there’s no national standard. A lack of a national standard confuses consumers and raises compliance costs for companies, PC World said.
The privacy bill of rights would allow consumers to decide what pieces of their personal data are collected by companies and decide how the data is used. The legislation would allow consumers to prohibit companies that collect their data for one purpose to use it for another purpose.
Obama will also push Congress to pass a student digital privacy bill that would limit companies that collect data as part of educational services to use it only for educational purposes. The proposal would prohibit companies from selling student data to third parties for non-educational purposes and from using data collected in an educational setting to deliver targeted advertising.
