Treasury guiding banks on privacy
The Treasury Department will release new security guidelines today to help financial institutions comply with the privacy requirements
The Treasury Department will release new security guidelines today to help
financial institutions comply with the privacy requirements in the Financial
Services Modernization Act of 1999.
The guidelines establish the "administrative, technical and physical safeguards
to protect the privacy of customers' personal information," said Jennifer
Dickerson, director of technology risk management at the Treasury's Office
of Thrift Supervision.
The guidelines are targeted at Title V of the act, which is also known as
the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Title V calls for "each financial institution
to respect the privacy of its customers and to protect the security and
confidentiality" of customers' personal information.
This includes information being transferred between the roughly 20,000 financial
institutions — banks, credit unions and lenders — and agencies such as Treasury,
the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve.
"It is a very risk-based approach, and the key components were actually
pulled from supervisory guidance that the institutions have already released,"
Dickerson said.
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