Privacy Ref

Starting January 1, 2020, if you are a for-profit company doing business in California, you may have new data privacy compliance obligations. Specifically, California just enacted the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (the country’s strictest data privacy law to date), placing new privacy mandates on certain businesses with respect to the personal information of […]

Not one to sit idly, twiddling his thumbs while the digital world goes by unchecked, Max Schrems has struck again. As you may recall, Schrems, a young Austrian attorney who became the EU champion of privacy rights, was the driving force behind having the EU-US Safe Harbor rule nullified. Now, on May 25, 2018, his

It is no secret that I am, for lack of a better term, a nerd. I am also a Privacy Consultant here at Privacy Ref, so I usually pride myself on knowing about privacy goings on in the world. However, for the first time I was bamboozled by changes to a privacy policy.

During the IAPP’s most recent Privacy Summit, I was approached with an interesting question. “I am a privacy professional and I know why GDPR is important. I know about the fines and requirements for compliance, but few others at my company do. How do I explain GDPR to my colleagues effectively?” I responded with a

Unfortunately, it is a given that as an organization you will receive a notice from a third party that they had an incident or breach that may have compromised personal or sensitive employee or customer information.  A majority of the breach laws require immediate notification or notification within a 24hr to 48hr timeframe, not including

In the past, despite numerous bills being submitted to it, Congress has not had much of an appetite for enacting a federal data privacy and breach notification law, choosing instead to leave it to the States.  In light of the recent Cambridge Analytica fiasco and the massive Equifax data breach, the time might now be

May has many holidays; Mothers Day, Memorial Day, Cinco de Mayo, Star Wars Day (May the fourth), and, of course, the new GDPR Day. Almost everyone is ready for the first four, but we continue to get calls from those GDPR procrastinators to help them prepare. With less than a month left to GDPR Day,

I have previously written about the importance of a privacy program to in part, manage trust between an organization and its customers. As more data breaches occur and privacy is made more of an issue that is embraced and examined by the general public, this trust will become more important. One example of this is the evolving

So, you have a formal data breach response plan in place or an informal plan of action in mind….now what?  With Alabama and South Dakota in a race to become the 49th state to enact data breach notification legislation (for sure, no one wants to be the “last man standing” in this scenario!), it may

The privacy landscape shifts, it seems, every week. The changes may come from new laws or regulations, changes in public opinion, expansion (or contraction) of your business, or the introduction of new technology to your infrastructure. Throughout this turmoil you need to have a privacy program that is resilient, adaptable, and agile so it can