WASHINGTON
President Barack Obama on Monday proposed new measures to protect against online identity theft.
"We're introducing new legislation to create a single strong national standard so Americans know when their information has been stolen or misuse," Obama said at the offices of the Federal Trade Commission.
The Personal Data Notification and Protection Act, would require companies to notify customers within 30 days of the discovery of a breach if sensitive information is exposed.
The proposal followed a number of high-profile hacks against American companies, including Sony Pictures Entertainment, that the U.S. government claims was perpetrated by North Korea.
"America's personal information, including financial information, gets stolen. And the problem is growing and it costs us billions of dollars," Obama said. "As Americans, we shouldn't need to forfeit our basic privacy when we go online to do our business."
The administration in 2014 required federal credit and debit cards to be outfitted with a microchip and a pin number.
In addition to asking Congress to address cyber attacks, Obama also asked lawmakers to pass the Student Digital Privacy Act, a bill that aims to protect student privacy by barring companies from selling student data to third parties for purposes unrelated to education, for commercial purposes.
For the first time since he was elected in 2008, Obama has laid out some of his State of the Union message and policies ahead of his Jan. 20 address to Congress.
"Since I've only got two years left in this job, I tend to be impatient and I didn't want to wait for the State of the Union to start sharing my plans," Obama said. "So I have been traveling across the country, rolling out some of the ideas that we will be talking about, a little bit of a sneak preview," he said.
