If you live in the US you really need to wake up and smell the coffee right now:
Now, if you're a little confused as to why Congress would be so attracted to the idea of replacing effective state laws on identity theft with weak federal ones, then you just haven't been paying much attention to how your government works. It is of course the banks, databrokers, and other financial institutions whose indifferent security practices keep exposing our personal information that don't want to have to notify us when it happens. And it is of course the credit bureaus, credit card companies, etc. who don't want us to be able to freeze our credit files just because identity thieves might have our information. So we're talking about a lot of big companies with a lot of influence -- i.e., money -- that they can spread around our nation's capital. -- Ed Foster
All kinds of bad legislation gets passed by US law makers on a seemingly daily basis but this one looks set to cause misery on a new scale. And of course by making sure that nobody hears anything you can expect that misery to go on for a long time.