Regulations Loom Large in 2006.

This article discusses the issue of compliance in privacy and data retention in the IT industry in the U.S. as of January 2006. Companies based outside but publicly traded in the U.S. must comply with Section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley. According to French Caldwell, research vice president at Gartner, Beyond Sarbanes-Oxley is a pile of privacy bills under consideration. The said bill may include a data-protection directive that gives every citizen the right to know, in real time, how their personal information is being used. Real-time monitoring and e-forensics is the ability to maintain an audit history of personal data. Also included in the revisions at the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure is data retention.