Information Privacy Concerns Will Continue To Plague Companies And Consumers in 2017

According to recent reports, consumers, in 2017, will continue to be threatened by data privacy attacks.  Data privacy is comprised of external cyber attacks; or violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) by the companies directly.  The victim is the consumer.

In the past couple years, several widespread data breaches have plagued consumers of companies and organizations at the hands of cyber attackers compromising over 1 billion customers’ personal information, including Yahoo!, Target, Home Depot, Wendy’s, Snapchat, Michaels, Neiman Marcus, UPS and BlueCross Blue Shield to name a few.

Another type of data privacy concern originates directly from the companies themselves.   Companies, both foreign and domestic, continue to violate the TCPA, which oversees unsolicited telemarketing contact through phone calls, text messages, faxes, auto-dialing calls and prerecorded messages, without consumer consent.  National retailer American Eagle just settled a class action lawsuit filed in 2014 against it for violating the TCPA by sending over 600,000 consumers spam text message advertisements in the past six years without consumers’ consent or after the consumers tried to unsubscribe.

Federal and state legislation is continuing to evolve to counter cybersecurity attacks and protect consumers’ privacy amid rapid technological advances.  While the Federal Trade Commission takes action against some companies that promise to keep their customers information safe, class action attorneys protect consumers by bringing private lawsuits against companies to recover damages for harms suffered as a result of data breaches and violations.