Call for new privacy law

The Government Accountability Office and privacy experts are calling for a major revamp of the U.S. Privacy Act, which dates from 1974. The GAO released two reports on the situation today, ComputerWorld reports, one calling for new privacy rules and one calling for the Office of Management and Budget to establish a chief privacy officer.

"Current laws and guidance impose only modest requirements for describing the purposes for personal information and limiting how it is used," Linda Koontz, the GAO's director of information management issues, wrote in one report.

Agencies are not required to be specific in their data-collection public notices, which "could allow for unnecessarily broad ranges of uses, thus calling into question whether meaningful limitations had been imposed," she wrote.