‘If we’re going to be connected, then we need to be protected.’
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: President Barack Obama has called for Congress to pass new legislation in order to safeguard American citizens online. The “Personal Data Notification and Protection Act” would strong-arm American corporations into notifying customers more expediently when sensitive information, such as credit card numbers and email addresses, are forcibly hacked from their systems.
“If we’re going to be connected, then we need to be protected,” Obama said during a public speech at the Federal Trade Commission offices on Monday. “As Americans, we shouldn’t need to forfeit our basic privacy when we go online to do our business. Each of us as individuals have a sphere of privacy around us that should not be breached, whether by our government, but also by commercial interests,” he added.
The president’s announcement comes after a turbulent year in terms of cyber attacks. In 2014, credit card information was notoriously dredged from databases belonging to Target and Home Depot—the latter of which took months to report the incursion—while hackers likewise took a digital scalpel to the email accounts of Sony Pictures, releasing a deluge of sensitive and embarrassing data.
The cyber attacks have raised dubious questions about how each company handled the attacks, as well the extent to which they are responsible for the stolen data. In the meantime, lawsuits have been launched against all three.
In addition to addressing cyber attacks, the president is also asking the Republican-controlled Congress to pass the “Student Digital Privacy Act,” which aims to protect student privacy by embargoing any student data sold to third parties for reasons extraneous to education, such as advertising.
Obama also announced several other digital privacy-related directives, including proposed revisions to the 2012 Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights and the implementation of information-sharing initiatives designed to aid feds in collaborating with companies affected by hacking.