ORDINANCE
WHEREAS, the City of Chicago is a home rule unit of government pursuant to the 1970 Illinois Constitution, Article VII, Section 6(a); and
WHEREAS, pursuant to its home rule power, the City of Chicago may exercise any power and perform any function relating to its government and affairs including the power to regulate for the protection of the public health, safety, morals, and welfare; and
WHEREAS, as practically every aspect of private and public business is conducted and stored on virtual networks and warehouses, data breaches are occurring more frequently and with more potentially disastrous repercussions; and
WHEREAS, "hacks" and data breaches have a near constant strong hold on news headlines as cybercrime afflicts nations and industries throughout the globe; and
WHEREAS, for example, in 2013, the retail giant Target had its systems breached by a cyber-attack that affected more than 41 million customer payment card accounts, causing Target to pay out $18.5 million in settlement fees; and
WHEREAS, in 2014, Home Depot's systems were breached and 50 million cardholders were affected, resulting in Home Depot agreeing to pay at least $19.5 million to compensate those individuals; and
WHEREAS, Equifax is a consumer credit reporting agency that collects and aggregates information on over 800 million individual consumers and more than 88 million businesses worldwide; and
WHEREAS, Equifax then sells this information to third parties in the form of consumer credit reports, insurance reports, and other consumer demographic and analytics infonnation; and
WHEREAS, on July 29, 2017 Equifax discovered evidence of a cyber security breach in their databases that stored confidential and private consumer information of approximately 143 million U.S. consumers; and
WHEREAS, consumer information compromised in the Equifax breach includes names, social security numbers, birth dates, addresses, driver's license numbers, credit card numbers, and documents containing...
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