It’s certainly not often that I am able to praise the actions of the government in my former home state of Massachusetts, so I will seize this rare opportunity to report passage on what appears to be a good bill aimed at preventing identity theft.
You may recall the well-known data breach a while back where retail giant TJX managed to facilitate the loss of personal information belonging to millions of customers when hackers somehow penetrated their systems.
Well, this new legislation does exactly what was needed to help prevent this type of thing and at the very least, force companies to promptly report 
incidents like this in the future. Unlike TJX, who kept the news of the breach to themselves while they probably figured out how to minimize the damage to their reputation.
Companies will now face fines for violating the new rules. I’m hopeful this will convince companies to stay in compliance since facing monetary loss is really the only thing many of these big companies pay attention to.
There are also new rules about destroying personal information that is being disposed of, which may make “dumpster diving” in the Bay State a bit less productive for identity thieves in the future.
The legislation now moves on to the governor for his signature and I expect it will meet with his approval.
For more details, check out this article.
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