The Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data in Hong Kong plans to launch a compliance review following a data breach that may have impacted 290,000 Shangri-La hotel group customers. Concern is that customers were not notified until more than two months that a breach potentially affecting their data had occurred.
Australia’s Attorney-General has said the government will make “urgent reforms” to the country’s Privacy Act following the Optus breach, where the company was blamed for lax security, resulting in the theft of nearly 10 million customer records. Resulting fines for that could reach as high as 2 million Australian dollars ($1.3 million). Certainly, it has put increased pressure on the government, which has been in process reviewing its privacy laws for several years, and now stated it may move on this within the next month.
There are two important new laws in California. The first, related to AB-1242, is designed to protect companies from having to respond to out-of-state search warrants that look to obtain abortion data. This will be relevant to the many internet and telecommunications based in the state and is part of a move to establish California as a sanctuary for abortion seekers. The second, AB 2089, is meant to protect patient mental health data not covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), particularly via the 20,000 or more online apps offering services based on probable diagnoses. Many harvest and then sell sensitive data that patients provide, but this would no longer be allowed.
Enterprise AI vendor Uniphore has acquired CDP ActionIQ and cloud data engineering system Infoworks. The combination of products will create a Zero Data AI Cloud that simplifies AI deployments by enabling companies to access data for AI projects without moving it from existing systems. Prices were not announced.