The following is not meant to be legal advice.
Privacy and data security has become a concern for states. With reports on lost laptop computers, and other means of losing personal data, on January 1, 2007, seven states joined twenty-seven other states in enacting data breach notification statutes: Arizona; Hawaii; Kansas; Nebraska; New Hampshire; Utah; and Vermont.
What impact do the state laws have for companies? Companies might take care to make certain they have effective and proactive data security policies in place. Companies might take care to ensure employees are trained on the procedures to discover and report security breaches.

The main focus by the states is notification of a data breach. The statutes apply generally only to state residents or entities conducting business in the state. This means that businesses will not need to comply with multiple reporting requirements. Personal Information is normally defined to mean a combination of a person’s name, such as first initial and last name, in combination with other identifying information such as a social security number, driver’s license number, or credit/debit card information. Parties that maintain, but do not own personal information, must notify the owner of the information when a breach occurs. Then, it falls on the data owner to inform customers and state authorities.
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