On March 3, 2020, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) signaled to covered entities of all sizes that they need to take their HIPAA obligations seriously.  OCR entered into a settlement and corrective action plan with a small physician practice for $100,000 to settle alleged violations of the HIPAA Security Rule.  This enforcement action is an example of OCR enforcing HIPAA’s requirements on smaller covered entities.  OCR specifically noted that this practice sees approximately 3,000 patients per year.
Continue Reading A Reminder That Covered Entities Of All Sizes Need To Comply With HIPAA Security Rule

Last week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) imposed a civil monetary penalty (“CMP”), to the tune of $2.15 million, against Jackson Health System (“JHS”).  The CMP stemmed from JHS’ numerous HIPAA violations that occurred from 2013 through 2016.  
Continue Reading A HIPAA Compliance Program “In Disarray” Leads to OCR Imposing a $2.15 Million Civil Monetary Penalty

Music.ly, now known as Tik Tok, an app popular with children and teenagers, settled a lawsuit with the FTC under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA”) to the tune of $5.7 Million Dollars.  This sum is the largest civil penalty the FTC has ever obtained under COPPA. 
Continue Reading Popular Children’s App Music.ly Settles FTC COPPA Claims

We’re all guilty of it.  We keep things that we don’t need, like that pair of stone-washed jeans from 1992 that you hope will come back into style or your beanie baby collection that you blindly believe might be worth something someday.  While our inability to purge old stuff from our closets may cost us closet space, the repercussions for an organization that hoards data are far more significant.  From a cybersecurity perspective, the more personal information a company maintains, the more information it has to lose.  Consequently, the more information a company loses, the higher the financial and reputational costs.
Continue Reading Less is more: The Role of Data Retention Policies in Cybsesecurtity Preparedness

In this third installation of our weekly series during National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we examine the importance of vendor due diligence as part of an overall cybersecurity strategy.   To do that, we are re-posting the 3-minute video we created earlier this year on the risks vendors pose and simple steps to reduce those risks.

Just days before the EU Commission reassesses the EU-US Privacy Shield program in light of the EU Parliament’s recent adequacy criticisms, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced settlements with four companies allegedly falsely claiming participation in the program.  One of the issues the EU Parliament cited this summer with the EU-US Privacy Shield program was lack of US oversight and enforcement.
Continue Reading More FTC Privacy Shield Settlements, But Will It Be Enough For The EU?

On September 23, 2018, California’s governor signed into law the first round of revisions to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the most sweeping privacy legislation in this country.  California enacted the CCPA in June and it takes effect on January 1, 2020.  Inspired by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, the California legislature initially drafted the CCPA in haste to avoid a ballot initiative containing more onerous provisions for businesses.  Not surprisingly, the hurried and voluminous legislation contained a number of issues that ranged from drafting errors to significant enforcement and compliance hurdles.  Accordingly, as expected, at the end of August, the legislature passed S.B. 1121, which contained several revisions to address some but not all of those issues, including a possible enforcement delay of up to six months.
Continue Reading California Governor Approves Revisions to Consumer Privacy Act

On September 20, the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced separate settlements with Boston Medical Center (BMC), Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) with penalties totaling $999,000.  In each instance, a news story about ABC News filming a medical documentary (a Boston Globe article on BMC and BWH and a posting on MGH’s website) prompted OCR to conduct “a compliance review.”  In all three separate investigations, OCR found deficiencies.  While the BMC settlement agreement does not provide any details on the specifically alleged improper conduct, the BWH and MGH agreements note that both hospitals took measures to protect patient information but nonetheless OCR found the efforts to be inadequate.  In those agreements, OCR implies that BWH and MGH obtained at least some written authorizations but disclosed information to the film crews before obtaining those authorizations.
Continue Reading Boston-Area Hospitals Pay Nearly $1M in Penalties for Permitting Filming of “Boston Med”

You could almost hear the cheers of plaintiffs’ class action lawyers in California last night, as California’s governor signed the most sweeping privacy law this country has seen to date.  Notably, the law gives consumers the right to statutory damages in the event of a breach if the company holding the consumer’s information failed to implement reasonable security measures.  Those statutory damages are not less than $100 and not more than $750 “per consumer per incident or actual damages, whichever is greater.”
Continue Reading California Gets Its Very Own GDPR with Statutory Damages