|
In November of 1999, Congress enacted the Financial Services Modernization Act (Gramm-Leach-Bliley), which contained weak privacy provisions, allowing wide-spread sharing of information about individuals' financial activities
without ensuring data privacy protections. Provisions of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act violated the notice, choice,
consent and access principles of the fair information practices, allowing financial institutions to share, sell and
otherwise use consumer data without consumer knowledge or control.
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, although falling far short of effective privacy standards, required federal agencies to
issue, for the first time ever, privacy rules for the financial sector. On May 11, 2000 the Federal Reserve, the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of Thrift Supervision
issued their final financial privacy rules, pursuant to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The agencies delayed the effective
date until July 2001. The Federal Trade Commission issued its final rules on May 15, 2000 with the same delayed
effective date.
Previous privacy legislation includes a bill, H.R. 10, that does not provide adequate privacy protections in both financial and medical privacy arenas.
Previous Headlines
|
