The Lesson From Eli Lilly’s Privacy Woes: Practice What You Preach
- Topics:
- Securities litigation
- Tags:
- Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld,
- Business Operations,
- E-mail,
- Eli Lilly & Co.,
- Litigation,
- Online Communications
- Source:
- Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld
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Overview: This article discusses some lesson from Eli Lilly’s privacy woes. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently announced a settlement with Eli Lilly (Lilly) for deceptive and unfair practices stemming from that company’s one-time, accidental release of 669 e-mail addresses. The e-mail addresses identified customers of Lilly who had signed up for an alert service on prozac.com. Under the consent order, Lilly must implement a four-stage security program that includes better training and supervision of its employees. Its web site offered a service to users that alerted them when to renew prescriptions. In keeping with industry standards, Lilly posted a typical privacy policy on prozac.com. The settlement provides a number of critical lessons: Companies must align their internal actions with their public words, companies must support the statements in their privacy policies, a company needs a responsible person with authority to oversee PII-related policies and practices, companies must establish secure, practical, foolproof procedures for collecting, managing, storing and handling PII.
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Format: PDF | Size: 18KB | Date: Mar 2002 | Pages: 4
