Adds medical and health insurance information within the definitions of personal identifying information.
Summary
A00920 amends New York’s penal law, general business law, and state technology law to expressly include medical information and health insurance information within the definition of “personal identifying information” for identity theft and related privacy protections. The bill updates the identity theft statutes so that misuse of a person’s medical history, diagnosis, treatment information, or health insurance policy and claims information can be treated the same way as misuse of other identifying data such as Social Security numbers, account numbers, and passwords.
The bill also makes conforming changes to the identity theft offenses in the penal law, including the provisions covering obtaining goods, money, property, services, or credit using another person’s identity. It repeals overlapping provisions in the general business law and state technology law that were added in a prior 2024 enactment on the same subject, and it ties its effective date to that earlier chapter so the statutes work together as a coordinated update rather than as separate, conflicting schemes.
Impact
The bill broadens the scope of protected personal identifying information under New York law, which can affect criminal identity theft prosecutions, consumer privacy protections, and obligations tied to handling sensitive data. By explicitly naming medical and health insurance information, it gives law enforcement and prosecutors clearer statutory authority to address identity theft involving healthcare records and insurance credentials, and it may also influence how businesses and state agencies classify and safeguard such information under related disclosure and security rules.
Sentiment
The available voting history shows strong, bipartisan support for the bill. It passed the Assembly Codes Committee, Assembly Rules Committee, the Assembly floor, and the Senate floor unanimously, with no recorded opposition in any of the listed votes. The lack of committee transcripts suggests there was little public controversy in the available record, and the bill appears to have been viewed as a straightforward consumer-protection and anti-fraud measure.
Contention
No notable opposition is reflected in the voting record, and there are no committee transcripts indicating substantive debate. The only apparent policy issue is the technical coordination with a prior 2024 chapter law: the bill repeals duplicate or overlapping language and aligns its effective date with that earlier enactment. That suggests the main concern was statutory cleanup and consistency, not disagreement over whether medical and health insurance information should be protected.