Duty LXD-1254
Processes voice recordings, in Texas
Unlawful Interception of Communications and Civil Remedysince 3 lines
Tex. Penal Code § 16.02; Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code §§ 123.001-.004 · Read the law's page
- Do not intercept, or procure another to intercept, a wire, oral or electronic communication unless you are a party to it or one of its parties has given prior consent, and never for the purpose of committing an unlawful act; one party's consent is enough.
- Do not disclose the contents of a communication you know or have reason to know were obtained by unlawful interception, and do not use contents you know, or are reckless about whether, were obtained that way.
- As a communication common carrier's officer, employee, or agent, you may intercept, disclose, or use a communication in the normal course of employment where necessary to service or to protect the carrier's rights or property, but you may not use service observation or random monitoring outside mechanical or service-quality checks.
Identity Theft Enforcement and Protection Act, business duty to protect sensitive personal informationsince 4 lines
Tex. Bus. & Com. Code sec. 521.052 · Read the law's page
- This binds any business that collects or maintains sensitive personal information (an individual's name combined with a Social Security number, driver's license or government-issued identification number, or a financial account, credit, or debit card number together with any required access code; or information that identifies an individual and relates to the individual's physical or mental health, health care, or payment for health care) in the regular course of business; a financial institution as defined by 15 U.S.C. § 6809 is exempt.
- Implement and maintain reasonable procedures, including taking any appropriate corrective action, to protect that sensitive personal information from unlawful use or disclosure. The statute states no further content for what 'reasonable' requires beyond this general standard.
- Destroy or arrange for the destruction of customer records containing sensitive personal information no longer to be retained, by shredding, erasing, or otherwise modifying the information to make it unreadable or indecipherable through any means.
- There is no private right of action for a violation of this duty; only the attorney general may enforce it, seeking a civil penalty of $2,000 to $50,000 per violation and injunctive relief under Section 521.151.
Cybersecurity Program safe harbor from exemplary damages (S.B. 2610)since 3 lines
Tex. Bus. & Com. Code ch. 542 (secs. 542.001-542.004) · Read the law's page
- This chapter applies only to a business entity with fewer than 250 employees that owns or licenses computerized data including sensitive personal information, as those terms are defined by Section 521.002.
- It is a safe harbor, not a duty: if such an entity is sued over a breach of system security and demonstrates that, at the time of the breach, it had implemented and maintained a cybersecurity program meeting Section 542.004's requirements, the claimant may not recover exemplary damages from it. A qualifying program must contain administrative, technical, and physical safeguards; conform to a named industry-recognized cybersecurity framework (the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, NIST SP 800-171, NIST SP 800-53/53A, the FedRAMP Security Assessment Framework, the CIS Critical Security Controls, the ISO/IEC 27000-series, the HITRUST Common Security Framework, the Secure Controls Framework, SOC 2, or a similar framework); and be scaled by headcount: simplified measures such as password policies and employee training below 20 employees, the CIS Controls Implementation Group 1 from 20 to 99 employees, and full conformance with a named framework from 100 to 249 employees.
- The chapter creates no duty to adopt a program and no cause of action of its own; it only removes exemplary-damages exposure for a qualifying entity that already has one at the time of a breach.