Connecticut Passes America’s Fifth Data Privacy Law

The momentum of states passing their own privacy laws is showing no signs of slowing down. The Connecticut legislature recently passed the Connecticut Data Privacy Act (CTDPA), which was then signed into law by Governor Ned Lamont. A trend that began with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and then the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) seems to be picking up pace—the CTDPA is the second such state law passed just in the first half of 2022, following right on the heels of...

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The Utah Consumer Privacy Act

Recently signed into law by Governor Spencer Cox, the Utah Consumer Privacy Act (UCPA) is now the nation’s fourth data privacy law to go on the books. While it does not go into effect until December 31, 2023, it’s never too early to learn about the new law and how it compares to privacy legislation in other states.

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CCPA: Attorney General Sets Sights on Customer Loyalty Programs

In a recent press release, California Attorney General Rob Bonta made it clear that customer loyalty programs are an enforcement priority for California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) compliance. His office sent out 30-day cure notices to a number of “major corporations in the retail, home improvement, travel, and food services industries.” Companies that fix any alleged violations of the data privacy law within that time period will face no further penalties.

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An Introduction to the Colorado Privacy Act

The latest in an emerging patchwork of state privacy legislation in the United States, Colorado recently passed and signed into law the Colorado Privacy Act (CPA). It is mostly an iteration of Virginia’s Consumer Data Protection Act (CDPA), also passed this year, but it has a few of its own unique features. It also takes a number of cues from the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), America’s first comprehensive data privacy law.

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CCPA Enforcement in Its First Year

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) officially became enforceable on July 1, 2020, and according to the California Attorney General, actual enforcement began on that very same day. Just over a year later, the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) has recently released a list of examples of the enforcement actions it has taken against businesses and how they were resolved.

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How Does Remote Work Affect CCPA Compliance?

After more than a year of remote work during the coronavirus pandemic, and with vaccines being more widely available, many businesses are now at a crossroads: Should they move their employees back to the office or continue working from home? Of course there are many considerations to take into account — everything from data security measures to how it changes the work environment — but for those businesses that fall under the requirements of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), one of...

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CCPA: The Benefits of Voluntary Compliance

If the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) applies to your business, there is no question you should already be in compliance with the privacy law. Enforcement began in July 2020, and with the creation of the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA), the expectation is that enforcement activities will increase dramatically. Some businesses have held off on making the required changes, as they weigh the risks and costs of non-compliance. Others may not yet realize that the CCPA applies to...

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Meet the CDPA: Virginia’s New Data Privacy Law

The push for states to create their own data privacy laws gained momentum as the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (CDPA) was signed into law by Governor Ralph Northam on March 3, 2021. Strongly influenced by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the CDPA is a major piece of privacy legislation that also differs from both of those laws in a number of ways.

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Surprise! The CCPA Applies to Many Small Businesses

The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) defines a clear and specific criteria for what businesses must comply. We’ve outlined the CCPA requirements in What Businesses Must Comply With The CCPA. 

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Does the CCPA Apply to Businesses Outside of California?

Some businesses assume that if they do not have a storefront or office in California, the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (“CCPA”) does not apply to them. That assumption is not only wrong, it could result in regulatory inquiries and monetary penalties.

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What’s New in the CPRA (CCPA 2.0)? More Than You Think.

The California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (CPRA) is on the ballot this November, and California voters are widely expected to approve the initiative. With some exceptions, the CPRA expands privacy protections afforded under the current California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA), giving consumers more rights over their personal information and requiring greater transparency and obligations from businesses. Beyond new rights, the CPRA establishes a privacy enforcement agency - the California...

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Under CCPA, You Might Be Selling Personal Information (Part 2)

Part 1 of this blog post discussed CCPA obligations if you use ad networks like Google or Facebook for interest-based advertising. Part 2 of this post is a discussion of the specific language in the CCPA that led us to conclude that interest-based advertising is a “sale” of information under the CCPA.

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Under CCPA, You Might Be Selling Personal Information (Part 1)

The first step to CCPA compliance is creating an information map and carefully evaluating how each of your vendors uses personal information your business shares with it. When you start this exercise, you may be surprised to find that under CCPA, you could be "selling" information when you share it with ad networks, data analytics providers, and possibly others.

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TrueVault Safe free for COVID-19 projects

TrueVault is offering its HIPAA-compliant service free of charge to nonprofit COVID-19 projects.

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Who has rights under the CCPA?

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) grants rights to California residents. But many businesses have decided to honor CCPA rights for consumers outside of California.

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CCPA: What is Personal Information?

When it comes to privacy laws, definitions matter. As we’ve discussed, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) broadly defines personal information. In this post, we’ll look at where the definition has a wider application and where it’s a bit more narrow.

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What is the CCPA?

In 2018, the California legislature passed a sweeping privacy law to protect consumers. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) became the most comprehensive consumer privacy law in the country.

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🎈🎉 Announcing: TrueVault Atlas Cloud 🎉🎈

Two months after we launched TrueVault Atlas as a self-managed solution, we are thrilled to announce we are launching TrueVault Atlas Cloud today.

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What are the penalties associated with GDPR?

 As previously explained, GDPR is a new law governing the collection and use of personal data. It will affect people or organizations which are established in the European Union or which offer goods or services to or monitor the behavior of people living in the EU. It came into force on 25 May 2018.

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How does GDPR define Personal Data?

GDPR is based around protecting personal information for individuals and as such, the term ‘personal data’ is a critical entryway into implementing GDPR. In the regulation, ‘personal data’ is specifically defined as: Any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an...

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What is a data subject access request?

A Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) refers to a petition by a data subject (an identifiable individual about whom personal data is held) to a data controller (e.g., an organization/institution which sets personal data processing standards) regarding their personal data. A data subject may request access to their personal data record, edits or corrections to their personal data record, or request that their some or all of their personal data record with the company be deleted. The organization...

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🎈🎉 Announcing: TrueVault Atlas 🎉🎈

 

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What happens after a data breach?

If your company aligns its data processing activities with the principles of privacy by design, the likelihood of a data breach happening is less than if you don’t adhere to these principles. However, in the event a data breach does occur, the penalties under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR or “The Regulation”) are harsh. In this fourth blog, we unpack the consequences facing businesses that experience a data breach.

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Privacy by design: Key philosophy of GDPR

This is the third in a series of blog posts that summarize some of the key concepts of the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR or “the Regulation”). Our previous posts answered two frequently asked questions: What is GDPR? and Does my business need to be GDPR compliant?. In this next blog post, we unpack one of the key principles of the Regulation — privacy by design.

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Does GDPR apply to my company?

The first blog post in our series introduced some of the fundamental concepts of GDPR. In this second blog post, we answer a question that many business owners are asking: how do I know if my business needs to be GDPR compliant?

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Introduction to GDPR

The scope of the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is far-reaching, and has turned lives upside down for many businesses that are sustained by collecting personal data from consumers.

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Inside the Vault: Searching and Fetching Data

Virtually any business that works in the healthcare space will be accessing and managing health information. If personally identifiable information (PII) is linked with medical information, that data is considered protected health information (PHI), a special class of data that must be secured according to HIPAA standards. But building a HIPAA-compliant application requires expert knowledge in engineering for security as well as the law itself. There are few small businesses that have the...

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Inside the Vault: How data flows in TrueVault

Virtually any business that works in the healthcare space will be accessing and managing health information. If personally identifiable information (PII) is linked with medical information, that data is considered protected health information (PHI), a special class of data that must be secured according to HIPAA standards. But building a HIPPA-compliant application requires expert knowledge in engineering for security as well as the law itself. There are few small businesses that have the...

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Will the midterms impact tech?

There are few issues that garner bipartisan consensus among United States lawmakers these days, but a desire to regulate Silicon Valley has proponents on both sides of the aisle. Naturally, the priorities and means for regulation differ largely according to a lawmakers’ constituents and region, political priorities and political party.

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Is antivirus software good or bad?

Everyone remembers working on the home desktop and seeing the alert pop-up in the right-hand corner of your screen: time to upgrade your (Name Brand) antivirus software. Clicking it takes you to a web page where the company tries to upsell you on the latest enhancements to their product. Today, antivirus software (AV) or more precisely, antimalware software, is more sophisticated, and some security experts will say, begrudgingly, that tools like Windows Defender are “mostly good enough” for...

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What's the difference between PII and personal data?

The two data protection regulations that TrueVault technology helps companies comply with are the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Both HIPAA and GDPR introduce distinct but related concepts surrounding what information constitutes as “personal”. In this blog, we clarify and untangle these definitions.

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Explaining Business Associate Agreements

If your business is exploring opportunities in the healthcare industry, chances are you will be working with health information that contains identifying details, also known as protected health information (PHI).

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How does data de-identification work?

Previously, we answered a commonly asked question: What constitutes as protected health information (PHI)? This time, we take our series a step further, and explain how de-identifying PHI will allow your business to work with health behavior data without liability.

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What is PHI?

Last week, we broke down the working definitions of personally identifiable information (PII) as it applies to laws like GDPR and CCPA. But there are laws that extend even further beyond regulating how businesses can collect and store personally identifiable information (PII) when health information is involved.

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What is personally identifiable information (PII)?

TrueVault is in the business of protecting personally identifiable information (PII) collected on behalf of your company. PII is different from other types of data, and by storing PII in our SecureVault, we limit the legal liability for businesses that interact with this sensitive data.

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Comparing TrueVault and HIPAA Compliant Hosting Services

Clients ask us a lot: What is the difference between TrueVault and HIPAA compliant hosts, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS)? The answer really comes down to risk. If you’re looking for a ready made solution to HIPAA compliance, use TrueVault. If you’re confident in your ability to build from scratch a secure and lawful platform that can store protected health information (PHI)  — essentially, build your own version of TrueVault — then you’ll start with a HIPAA compliant host, such as AWS.

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Announcing Tokenization Engine

Today, TrueVault is launching Tokenization Engine, a new feature of SecureVault, to help companies import healthcare data without the legal burden of HIPAA compliance. The Problem There is clear business value to leveraging health behavior data, but working with healthcare data can be problematic. If a company wishes to work with healthcare data, chances are this data includes Protected Health Information (PHI), a special class of data that requires compliance with HIPAA regulations because it...

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MFA Strategies: Not All are Created Equal

This week Reddit disclosed a data breach, the result of account-takeover attacks targeting Reddit employees with access to user data. The attack worked because these Reddit employees used SMS-based Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). This exposed them to a popular social-engineering attack where the assailant is able to intercept text messages by fooling the target’s cell phone provider. In these types of attacks, the perpetrator does not need to be particularly sophisticated or even technical.

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Do I Need to Be GDPR Compliant?

As covered in the previous blog post, GDPR is a new law regulating the processing (collection and use) of individuals’ personal data, which comes into effect on May 25th, 2018. If you are covered by GDPR, then not only will your customers expect you to be compliant, but your business partners may require it as a condition of their contracts. Moreover, the fines for breaching the Regulation are harsh, going up to €20,000,000 or 4% of your global turnover (whichever is higher). With that in mind,...

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What is GDPR?

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an extensive new law regulating the collection and use of personal data of individuals in the European Union, which comes into effect on May 25, 2018. GDPR replaces the Data Protection Directive of 1995, which was the EU’s first legal framework covering data security. In the 20 years since then, the explosion in the use of computers and the internet has contributed to a huge rise in the collection and processing of personal data. Unfortunately,...

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Announcing the Official TrueVault JavaScript SDK

Attention JavaScript developers! Today we are releasing the official TrueVault JavaScript SDK. The SDK abstracts away the details of making requests to our API. This will significantly reduce the time it takes to build a new project on top of TrueVault, or to add TrueVault to an existing project. To see how the SDK is used in a real project, check out the TrueVault JavaScript Sample Application. This is a full-featured React app that uses the SDK to interact with TrueVault.

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Multi-Factor Authentication for Users

Earlier this year we released Multi-Factor Authentication for Accounts. This has helped our customers stave off Social Engineering attacks by requiring more than just a username and password when logging in to the TrueVault Management Console. Today we are extending MFA functionality to the end users of TrueVault applications. Now, applications that integrate with TrueVault will be able to implement MFA enrollment, authentication, and unenrollment by taking advantage of our User MFA API.

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Protect Your Organization From Ransomware, Social Engineering, and Other Attack Vectors

Compliance with HIPAA, although vital, is not enough to ensure that customer data will be genuinely secure: Anthem was HIPAA-compliant, and yet they still suffered one of the biggest data security breaches in history. Often, the weakest link in a system is the people operating it. Whether by accident or design, it can be all too easy for them to allow threat actors access to your systems, giving them the opportunity to do what they want with patient data.

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Multi-Factor Authentication for Accounts

Today we're happy to announce Multi-Factor Authentication for the TrueVault Management Console. Many of the threats our customers face are the result of human, not technical, errors. Social Engineering encompasses a broad range of attacks that are especially difficult to defend against because they exploit human mistakes: clicking on a phishing link, typing a password in public, running dubious software, joining an untrusted network, etc. TrueVault is working hard to keep your data safe even...

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Better Access Control with Less Configuration: Ownership

A major pillar of security is access control. It doesn't matter how strong your encryption is if your access control rules are too broad and you unintentionally give the wrong user access to too much information. At TrueVault, we strive to make it easy for you to build a secure product from top to bottom. This means that it's not enough for us to put your data in an iron-clad vault; we also need to help you precisely control access to each record.

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Why Friday's Massive DDoS Attack Should be Terrifying

Friday's massive DDoS attack made a number of hugely popular websites unavailable for much of the country for large parts of the day. Our service wasn't directly affected by this incident, but the nature and scope of this attack is tremendously worrisome. DDoS In a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, the perpetrator overwhelms a target company by flooding their service with so much phony traffic that their service is unable to serve authentic requests.

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Data De-Identification - An Easier Way to HIPAA-Compliance

Creating a HIPAA-compliant product doesn’t have to be a harrowing experience, but most teams unwittingly choose the slowest, riskiest, and most challenging path to compliance. This post seeks to shed some light on a faster and simpler approach: Data De-Identification. If you take the hard path, retrofitting an existing application to become HIPAA-compliant can be a huge undertaking:

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Sending Personalized Email with TrueVault

TrueVault has partnered with SendGrid to send personalized emails to your customers using the TrueVault API. This post walks you through the integration process and shouldn't take more than fifteen minutes to complete. Setup in SendGrid The first thing to do is setup a new SendGrid Account. If you just want to try this out, you can take advantage of SendGrid's generous free plan, which lets you send 12k emails per month.

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Keep Your Data Out Of The Wrong Hands

We approach security from two angles: prevention and mitigation. Of course we do everything we can to prevent a breach, but we know that isn't enough. History has proven that the software we all depend on has vulnerabilities. We design systems with this reality in mind, and do everything we can to mitigate the damage if a breach occurs. Today we're asking for feedback on a product our R&D department is exploring, which will drastically reduce your exposure if your system is compromised.

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Understanding the EU/US Privacy Shield and Its Impact on Business

The US/EU Safe Harbor framework has been invalidated, but a new agreement known as the EU/US Privacy Shield is in the process of being implemented. The new agreement introduces a series of limitations on the processing of European data that will have serious implications for U.S. companies handling European citizen data. Here is what this new agreement entails, what it will mean in practice, and what you should know going forward.

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