Saturday, January 07, 2017

…because they can help connect hackers to other data? 
Mark L. Krotoski and W. Scott Tester of Morgan Lewis remind entities that duty to notify of a breach depends on state definitions of “personal information,” and more states are now including usernames or email addresses as personal information:
Illinois, Nebraska, and Nevada are the latest to add usernames or email addresses to the definition of PI when they are combined with information that would permit access to an online account.  The Illinois law took effect on January 1, 2017, while the respective laws in Nebraska and Nevada took effect in 2016.
Three other states (California, Florida, and Wyoming) had previously enacted laws mandating that either a username or email address constitutes PI when combined with a password or security question and answer that would permit access to an online account.
Read more on Lexology


Perspective.  Pity the little old FBI agent charged with reading all of these.
Facebook says people sent 63 billion WhatsApp messages on New Year’s Eve
Facebook-owned WhatsApp today announced that people sent 63 billion messages on New Year’s Eve, setting a new record for the app that lets people have chats and make voice and video calls.
Within those 63 billion messages, there were 7.9 billion images and 2.4 billion videos, a WhatsApp spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.


Somehow I doubt it. 
Trump Nominees’ Filings Threaten to Overwhelm Federal Ethics Office
Rex W. Tillerson owns more than $50 million of Exxon Mobil stock, has earned an annual salary of $10 million and holds a range of positions — from director at the Boy Scouts of America to the managing director of a Texas horse and cattle ranch.
But Mr. Tillerson is prepared to resign from all those posts, sell all his stock and put much of his money into bland investments like Treasury bonds if he becomes secretary of state, according to an “ethics undertakings” memo he filed this week with the State Department.  And, if he returns to the oil industry in the next decade, he could lose as much as $180 million.
   The disclosures are then used by the agencies they are to take over, along with the Office of Government Ethics, to identify potential conflicts of interest and to negotiate ethics letters to be signed by the nominees, committing to avoid conflicts of interest.
At the same time, this class of wealthy incoming officials could save hundreds of millions of dollars in income tax payments, thanks to a special tax benefit created so that affluent Americans do not avoid federal government jobs.


Can it be that simple?
AT&T-Time Warner deal likely to avoid FCC scrutiny
AT&T will likely circumvent Federal Communications Commission (FCC) oversight in its attempted purchase of Time Warner, according to an SEC filing released Friday.
In an S-4 filing, Time Warner said that it had completed a review of its FCC licenses and determined that it “will not need to transfer any of its FCC licenses to AT&T.”
If Time Warner and AT&T had decided to keep the licenses in the acquisition, the FCC would have had a chance to review and potentially block the $85 billion deal.  President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly still interested in blocking the sale, with some experts speculating that review of the deal by a Trump-appointed FCC chairman could thwart the company's’ intentions.

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