Comment Text:
The CFTC has proposed exempting some financial organizations from annual privacy notices.
see below:
Beginning May 28, 2019 certain dealers and merchants will be able to avoid sending out an annual privacy notice, under a revision the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has made to its GLB privacy regulations. Under GLB, financial institutions must send customers annual privacy notices. The law applies to futures commission merchants, commodities trading advisors, commodity pool operators, and introducing brokers through regulations enforced by the CFTC. The CFTC, unlike other regulators that enforce GLB, had not prior to this amendment permitted regulated entities to avoid an annual notice. Other regulators had done so, pursuant to a 2015 amendment to GLB, in certain proscribed circumstances.
Now, as with other regulators, the CFTC will allow covered entities to avoid sending an annual notice provided that the covered entities share nonpublic personal information only in limited circumstances and have not changed their privacy practices since the last-sent privacy notice. The circumstances in which a covered entity can share nonpublic personal information and still avoid sending an annual notice include sharing with a third party to perform services for the covered entity, to perform a transaction that a consumer authorizes, or with the consumer’s consent.
Certainly a condition of such exemption from privacy notices is assurance and security of consumer financial and identifying information from unauthorized access or unauthorized distribution. The proposal to restore the applicable Reg 160 requirements is necessary and appropriate to provide full regulation of privacy regulations to financial entities, particularly in view of the proposed exemption from annual privacy notices.
