Needing A New Approach to Address Employee Data Breaches in the American Workplace

Description

The Sony Pictures Entertainment data breach of 2014 dramatically illustrated the risk of identity theft that workplace data breaches pose to American employers’ employees. Recognition of that risk occurred as long ago as 2003. Many if not ‘most data breaches have gone undetected since as long ago as 1996—and that may always be the case. In other words, the reality has been and may always be that often (1) employees inow that their personal data has been compromised only when they become victims of identity theft, and (2) employees do not know that their employers are the source of the breached data. For those and other reasons, the current remedies those employees are expected to use to address data breaches—ie, breach notifications, ex post defensive efforts, and lawsuits—are ‘inadequate. The need for a new remedy is clear. This paper presents a novel analysis of the inadequacies and need noted above by proposing how the need might be satisfied. It also evaluates the proposal in relation to data breaches, workers’ compensation laws, and employer-provided health insurance in the United States of America. In doing 0, this paper also notes how the adoption of the proposal might enable a potentially new means of detecting data breaches