ERIE COUNTY, N.Y. \u2014\u00a0Charles Castiglia, owner of Lakeside Memorial Funeral Home, has collected fingerprints for almost 20 years for families wanting to memorialize a loved one in a piece of jewelry or a tattoo.<\/p>\n
“Something unique of the person that they lost,” said Castiglia.<\/p>\n
Under Erie County’s recently signed Biometrics Law, the funeral home will now have to shred old paper copies of the data.<\/p>\n
“Which kinda stinks because if the family comes back to us and we’ve had families come back, five, six, 10 years later, saying, ‘do you still have a copy of the prints?’ We don’t have it. Well, I no longer have the copies of the prints for those families,” Castiglia said.<\/p>\n
During a public hearing in May, Castiglia led the charge and made a presentation on behalf of the Erie Niagara Funeral Directors Association.<\/p>\n
He asked county leaders for, and was granted, an exemption now allowing funeral homes to hold prints for one year before destroying them or giving them to the family.<\/p>\n
He had asked for a three-to-five-year exemption.<\/p>\n
“I wish the county would give us a little bit longer than one year, just because families do come back. They’re very emotional. They’ll ask us to take the fingerprints and say, ‘hey, could you wait a little bit? We’re not ready to make that decision just yet.’ And it could take them longer than a year to make a decision that they want to do something with the fingerprint. But I understand why they did a year. It makes sense because they’re not looking at it from a grieving person’s perspective. Their just saying, ‘well, it seems reasonable,'” said Castiglia.<\/p>\n
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz signed<\/a> the Biometrics Transparency and Privacy Act into law in May, banning businesses from collecting, using, retaining and selling biometric data, or information that can be derived from it.<\/p>\n “It’s a little bit different than a user name and password. It’s unique to an individual and if someone were to compromise your biometric data or a thief were to steal it, you can’t get that back. You can’t change it,” said\u00a0Jennifer Andres, director of consumer protection, Erie County.<\/p>\n Businesses had until July 5 to disclose if they possess the data and how they plan to destroy it.<\/p>\n “If the division is made aware of a business that is in possession of biometric data and has not fulfilled the requirements of the law, than we would work toward enforcing that,” said Andres.<\/p>\n Legal experts with Phillips Lytle cite an upward trend in regulating the data.<\/p>\n “We’ve seen amendments to existing data privacy and security laws expand the definition of personal and private information that includes biometric data,” said\u00a0Anna Mercado Clark, chief information security officer, Phillips Lytle.<\/p>\n She says there are some circumstances when the date could help maintain security, or access an employer provided protected system.<\/p>\n “Without relying on a document that could be forges, that could be lost, that could contain incorrect information,” she said.<\/p>\n County leaders are urging full compliance from the business community.<\/p>\n “It is on the business to understand if this law applies to them and to uncover whether or not they are collecting, using, storing, selling, monetizing biometric data in any way,” said Andres.<\/p>\n Businesses like Lakeside Memorial.<\/p>\n “It’s the law. It’s important for us to do things the right way. We totally understand why the county created this law and enacted it,” said Castiglia.<\/p>\n The law states that, depending on the type of violation, businesses could face fines of a $1,000 to $5,000 a day.<\/p>\n The Syracuse Common Council<\/a> and Monroe County Legislature<\/a> have also voted to also ban local businesses from collecting and sharing data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ERIE COUNTY, N.Y. \u2014\u00a0Charles Castiglia, owner of Lakeside Memorial Funeral Home, has collected fingerprints for almost 20 years…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":282257,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[1611,60,136,138,137,51679,139,294,25636],"class_list":["post-282256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-erie","tag-buffalo","tag-business","tag-erie","tag-erie-headlines","tag-erie-news","tag-mark-goshgarian","tag-news","tag-public-safety","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282256\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}