Having just reached a settlement with the Commission in which the company is required “to take several steps to make sure it lives up to its promise in the future, including giving consumers clear and prominent notice and obtaining consumers’ express consent before their information is shared beyond the privacy settings they have established,” Facebook is changing the privacy setting of its users in a way that gives the company far greater ability to disclose their personal information than in the past. With Timeline, Facebook has once again taken control over the user’s data from the user and has now made information that was essentially archived and inaccessible widely available without the consent of the user.
sandy ingram on 29 Jul 10As we previously mentioned, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal filed the first HIPAA-related lawsuit. That lawsuit has now been settled, also a first. The settlement agreement [PDF] between the State of Connecticut and the defendants (Health Net) is the result of the loss of a computer disk drive that had unencrypted health information for 1.5 million health plans. Health Net, under the terms of the settlement, has agreed to pay $250,000 to the state of Connecticut, offer 2 years of credit monitoring to those affected, obtain identity theft insurance and reimburse those affected for security freezes. They will also be required to greatly improve their security measures.