Archive for the ‘Laws & Regulations’ Category

Business Info Fact Of The Day: Smart Business Leaders Encrypt PII

Friday, January 16th, 2009

If you are a business leader you must know and understand that encrypting personally identifiable information (PII) protects that PII from being used for identity theft and other crimes should it fall into the hands of a crook. Business leaders need to know this, but unfortunately too many do not really know what encryption is, let alone how it can be used to protect PII, along with the business.

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Surveillance: Iowa Support’s Wife’s Privacy Invasion Claim

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

Privacy-related news in Iowa…and there seems to be a lot of it sometimes…is always of special interest to me. I often wonder how the same types of situations would play out in other states. Here’s an invasion of privacy case regarding in-home surveillance that is particularly interesting…

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CORRECTION: Massachusetts Data Protection Law Takes Effect May 1, 2009

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

A big thank you to Brandon Dunlap and Brett Myers for catching an error I made in my January 1 post

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New Data Protection Laws Go Into Effect Today

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

Happy New Year!
Several news laws go into effect today. Here are just a few of them…

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New HHS Guidance States HIPAA Does Not Apply To PHRs

Sunday, December 28th, 2008

I hope you are all having a wonderful holiday season! I hadn’t planned to take the past few days off from blogging, but something like the flu (probably the flu) hit me like a bag of bricks on Christmas day and I’ve been curled in a fetal position in my bed for the past few days. Oddly enough while laying there feeling like my bones were all slowly dissolving (and thinking about the types of body braces you’d need to create to deal with something like that!) I was also thinking about how silly it was for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA; and any industry-specific data protection law) to define that the only organization’s that would legally need to safeguard protected health information (PHI) are the narrowly defined covered entities (CEs); healthcare providers, healthcare insurers and healthcare clearinghouses.

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HHS’s New Privacy & Security Framework Based Upon The OECD Privacy Principles

Friday, December 19th, 2008

Earlier this week, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a framework, “Nationwide Privacy and Security Framework For Electronic Exchange of Individually Identifiable Health Information December 15, 2008” for protecting patient privacy and securing medical records, in particular online protected health information (PHI) records.

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FTC Publishes Report On SSNs and Identity Theft

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008

Today the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a new report about social security numbers (SSNs), identity theft, and recommended 5 ways to help prevend having SSNs being used for identity theft…

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ED and HHS Gives Guidance for HIPAA and FERPA Relationship

Friday, December 12th, 2008

I saw some interesting news from the OS OCR Privacy List listserve. If you are with an education institution or a healthcare covered entity, take some time to read the new guidance about the relationship between FERPA and HIPAA

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New Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) Regulations

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

New FERPA Regulations were issued yesterday…

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New Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) Regulations

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

New FERPA Regulations were issued yesterday…

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