Health data — including the privacy and security ramifications of it — is very much on the mind of Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Edith Ramirez, according to an interview published over the weekend in The Washington Post.
“You might purchase a smartbed that could monitor your heart rate and your respiration, as well as capture snoring patterns. It might also permit you, from the comfort of your bed, to lock your doors or turn off your lights,” Ramirez said while discussing the benefits and risks of ubiquitous, mobile data.
“Not only is this smartbed collecting a lot of health information, it’s also now providing connectivity that could raise security issues,” said Ramirez, a classmate of President Obama at Harvard Law School. She said it is the job of the FTC to call attention to those risks and help industry find ways to lessen the chance of a breach.
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“We encourage companies to think hard about privacy and data security from the get-go. From the time they conceive a service or product, we want them to be thinking about how to incorporate protections,” Ramirez said.
While the FTC often is seen as the nation’s “top cop on digital privacy and security,” according to The Post, Ramirez said her agency actually lacks the authority to impose civil penalties for data security and privacy violations.
“The commission as a whole has been urging Congress to enact data security legislation, and as part of that we believe we ought to have civil penalty authority,” she said.
Ramirez also addressed the common criticism that regulation has not kept pace with innovation. “We were certainly looking at online commerce when the Internet first became popular,” she said.
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