The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will consider new rules to crack down on commercial surveillance practices that put Americans’ at risk from threat actors.
According to Cyberscoop, these surveillance practices put Americans’ data at risk of falling into the hands of ‘hackers and data thieves’.
FTC chair Lina Khan said, “The growing digitization of our economy—coupled with business models that can incentivize endless hoovering up of sensitive user data and a vast expansion of how this data is used—means that potentially unlawful practices may be prevalent. Our goal today is to begin building a robust public record to inform whether the FTC should issue rules to address commercial surveillance and data security practices and what those rules should potentially look like.”
The agency also noted other concerns about the commercial surveillance industry including poor data security protecting information collected on consumers, how it can lead to discriminatory outcomes for automated systems and the misleading ways companies collect consumer information.
The FTC is also exploring possible civil penalties for first-time offenses.
Sam Levine – director of the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection – said, “We’ve brought scores of data security case and we are still almost on a weekly basis seeing devastating data breaches. I think one of the things we want to hear from the public on is whether we need to deter these practices in the first instance and one key tool we have for achieving that deterrence is civil penalties.
A study by IBM Security has found that the global average cost of a breach has hit a new high of $4.35m.
The study – which was conducted in partnership with the Ponemon Institute – found that global average breach costs climbed nearly 13% over the last two years with a huge 83% of organisations experiencing more than a single breach.
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