The Connecticut legislature has passed, and the governor has signed, legislation to protect the personal information of state residents. Public Act No. 08-167 is titled An Act Concerning the Confidentiality of Social Security Numbers, but it safeguards much more than SSNs. Connecticut recognizes that personal data can encompass a state license or ID number, a health insurance number, and more.

The new law comes as a recent audit reveals, "For more than three years, the state Department of Administrative Services posted the Social Security numbers of individual contractors on a state Web site in violation of state law." Connecticut also recently launched an investigation into the loss of unencrypted data tapes by Bank of New York Mellon Corp.; the loss placed almost 500,000 Connecticut residents at risk of identity theft.

“In our fast-paced world, it takes only moments for someone to steal an identity and commit significant, long-lasting damage to a credit record,” Gov. M. Jodi Rell said, during the signing ceremony for Public Act No. 08-167. "The law requires anyone possessing [personal] information to safeguard it, along with the computer files and documents containing it, and specifically mandates that businesses that collect Social Security numbers develop a privacy protection policy. Those who violate the law will be subject to civil penalties of $500, up to a maximum of $500,000 per instance."

The new law reads, in part:

Section 1. (NEW) (Effective October 1, 2008) (a) Any person in possession of personal information of another person shall safeguard the data, computer files and documents containing the information from misuse by third parties, and shall destroy, erase or make unreadable such data, computer files and documents prior to disposal.

[…]

(c) As used in this section, "personal information" means information capable of being associated with a particular individual through one or more identifiers, including, but not limited to, a Social Security number, a driver’s license number, a state identification card number, an account number, a credit or debit card number, a passport number, an alien registration number or a health insurance identification number, and does not include publicly available information that is lawfully made available to the general public from federal, state or local government records or widely distributed media. […]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 and is filed under Identification, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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