A package of bills advancing in the New Jersey legislature would hold companies more accountable when consumers’ personal information gets compromised.
Assembly Consumer Affairs Committee chairman Paul Moriarty says one of the bills would allow a parent or guardian to put a freeze on a child’s credit report...preventing new credit cards being opened in their names.
“29 other states do this. We need to do it here. We need to protect our minors. We need to protect their information because there are people out there that will take that information and use it fraudulently to start their own credit and compromise people’s information.”
Assemblyman Jim Kennedy says his bill would require a company that had a data breach to pay the costs for customers to get a credit report every month for a period of 6 months. He says it would benefit businesses as well as consumers.
“The example easier to demonstrate would be a payroll company. You’re a small employer, say you have a hundred people in your firm. The company that writes those checks to those people gets breached. You know they’re going to have access to the social security number. You can do a lot with that.”
Another bill intended to reduce the risk of identity theft would require credit reporting agencies to encrypt the information they send out when they get requests about consumer credit worthiness.