There is no comparable federal law, but you might as well pretend there was. Because all the major states have such laws, exempting residents of the other 11 is not practical. But conforming to these laws is not only humiliating, it's expensive -- the average data breach cost $197 per exposed file, according to one study. Sending out the notification letters only cost $15 each, with the bulk of the cost stemming from lost business.
But most of the state laws in question include a "get out of jail free card," specifically exempting encrypted data, so that losing it doesn't count. For the other states, the exemption is presumably implied, as a thief could not extract information from the data.
Basically, the genie is out of the bottle. Data that escapes into the wild can live there indefinitely, thanks to the Web, where scam artists swap stolen identities as if they were baseball cards (and for comparable prices). One list shows that 227 million personal records have been lost in the U.S. since the start of 2005.
Obviously, encrypting sensitive data on your server is your best move. Your server may be locked up tight, in both the physical and network sense, but tomorrow someone could copy a sensitive file to his laptop, and the day after tomorrow that laptop could be stolen out of his car. And then you'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about data breach notification laws.
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