Companies have a responsibility to protect the sensitive employee and consumer data they hold, but we do not know how much of their revenues must be spent on this effort before it is considered enough. We do not know what protections meet the legal requirements to secure the personal data of others. A new case may change the way these matters are considered, applied and litigated for data security breaches.
On June 6, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the FTC could not enforce its injunction ordering LabMD to "complete[ly] overhaul" LabMD's data security program.1 The Eleventh Circuit made the ruling on technical grounds, but this decision could have far-reaching substantive implications in the field of data security. 2 It may be read as the first US case to insist that reasonable standards be prescribed by regulators who attempt to remedy inadequate personal data protection by companies.
The Court did NOT rule on whether the FTC can force companies to improve data security as part of its UDAP enforcement power. The Third Circuit in the 2015 Wyndham case confirmed the FTC's authority to regulate failures in data security as a UDAP violation, and that opinion was not questioned by the LabMD Court. To date, when the FTC ruled that a company's security lapse rose to the level of a UDAP violation, the FTC has been able to resolve the matter with vague orders to make things better. But this may not be possible after the LabMD case.
The LabMD Court struck down the FTC's current practice in
these cases but did not propose or prescribe a clear alternative.
In essence, the LabMD Court ruled where FTC finds that failure to
plan adequate data security becomes unfair or deceptive to
consumers, the FTC can't enforce its decision by ordering
broad, non-specific changes affecting security across the entire
defendant's business. Without using the term, the Eleventh
Circuit decided that there must be standards for a business to
follow, and those standards are best set forth by either the FTC or
by Congress itself.
So where does this leave the FTC, whose previous chair, Maureen
Ohlhausen, avowed to change the agency's past practices and to
only address tangible harms, to exercise regulatory humility, and
to foster business innovation? Whoever is serving as Commissioners,
the current administration has been clear that its priorities are
for an FTC that is less aggressive in its filings against private
companies. It is likely that in the next three years the FTC will
only take up cases against companies experiencing major security
breaches where it can be established that actual harm from security
failures befell affected consumers. Even then, we may not see FTC
action against companies where otherwise we would have expected
it.
The LabMD case plays into this directional lean by the agency. Thus
far, no court or agency has been eager to propose that a broadly
defined set of data security standards was required of US
businesses, and highly specific sets of standards tend to fall
flat, because 1) the risks and technologies are ever-changing, and
2) each defendant company's data and resources will vary
widely. Courts have not yet been forced to rule on what adequate
security standards look like for any specific business.
This has had the effect of imposing nearly strict liability on
any company that suffers an attack from outside forces – if
no standards are set forth, then regulators can simply assume that
a data breach proves that security was unlawfully inadequate. But
this is the same as suggesting that the simple fact that a shopper
falls in a grocery store means that the store was clearly negligent
in maintaining its floors. This has never been the way US tort
litigation has worked. This de facto strict liability has only been
apparently applied for data breaches because none of the damage
claims in these cases have been fully litigated. Each major data
breach UDAP case has been settled, thrown out for lack of damages,
or upheld an administrative finding with no specific standards
defined and applied.
The LabMD Court has blasted this status quo, demanding that where
regulators meddle in a company's data security policy
decisions, they do so with some specific standards laid out for the
world to see. This will make FTC enforcement in this space even
rarer and difficult. So we are likely to see movement in data
security UDAP violations in the near future to arise at a
state-by-state process, and likely to see more emphasis on what a
company should be doing right, and not simply what it was doing
wrong.
Footnotes
1 LabMD, Inc. v. FTC, No. 16-16270 (11th Cir., June 6, 2018), http://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/201616270.pdf
2 The ruling could also have far-reaching implications in the more generalized field of U.S. federal administrative cease and desist orders in Unfair or Deceptive Acts and Practices (UDAP) cases, as this may have been the first case to call the structure and enforcement mechanisms of a UDAP claim into question as unsupported by Congressional action. However, general UDAP claims are not the focus of this discussion.
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