Privacy still a good talking point for US federal govt but poor action item

The U.S. Government Accountability Office, the highest scold in the land, sounds tired of being ignored with in comes to protection the biometric data of the nation’s citizens. Beyond the fact that privacy is, indeed, getting short shrift in Washington, this lack of action is a lengthy trend.

Having already published a broad-based September report on high-risk practices, GAO officials have been teasing apart their critical recommendations, two at a time and has published the last topic breakout.

The final pair of tasks are important, almost as important as the fact that the GAO could not go 100 words in this last break out without updating readers: Of 236 public recommendations on the sensitive data made by the agency in 13 years, 60 percent have not been enacted as of December.

This report focuses, first, on the federal government’s critical need to better protect the personal and sensitive data that it collects and manages. Second, officials need to protect information in retirement plans.

Because this material has already been addressed, this round is more of a way of ensuring that policy makers and other officials pay attention. And the data is not flattering.

While 22 agencies have established a system of records- notice policies (and two partially complied), only 10 agencies developed a privacy risk management strategy (the rest did not address it at all).

All 24 agencies have ensured coordination with incident-response teams, but only 14 had created a continuous-monitoring strategy for privacy.

Article Topics

biometric data  |  biometrics  |  data privacy  |  data protection  |  GAO (Government Accountability Office)  |  regulation  |  U.S. Government