Days after Congress announced plans to tackle the iPhone tracking issue, a Connecticut senator is also asking for answers about Sony's PlayStation Network security breach.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, wrote to Sony president Jack Tretton on Tuesday, expressing concern that the company did not immediately notify its customers about the breach and asking that Sony provide them with access to financial data security services.
Sony's PlayStation network has been having issues since last Wednesday, but it was not until last night that Sony confirmed that hackers had obtained personal information from the network, which possibly included credit cards. Sony said it expects to "restore some services" within a week, but did not elaborate.
Blumenthal said he was "troubled" by Sony's delayed reaction. "A breach of such a widely used service immediately raises concerns of data privacy, identity theft, and other misuse of sensitive personal and financial data, such as names, email addresses, and credit and debit card information," he wrote.
Blumenthal suggested that Sony provide customers with access to free credit reports for two years. "Affected individuals should also be provided with sufficient insurance to protect them from the possible financial consequences of identity theft," he said.
Meanwhile, Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, suggested that Sony was playing "Grand Theft Info" with the breach.
Markey, who has also called on Apple to provide more details about iPhone tracking, said in a statement that he is "concerned about the risk of identity theft and other crimes that could be caused by the release of this information. Sony needs to explain how this incident occurred, why this information does not appear to have been encrypted and what Sony is doing to fix the problem and help consumers whose data was exposed."
In a Tuesday blog post, Patrick Seybold, senior director of corporate communications and social media at Sony, insisted that "there's a difference in timing between when we identified there was an intrusion and when we learned of consumers' data being compromised."
Sony learned of the intrusion on April 19 and subsequently shut down its services. It then brought in outside experts to assess the damage, which took some time, he said.
"It was necessary to conduct several days of forensic analysis, and it took our experts until yesterday to understand the scope of the breach," Seybold wrote. "We then shared that information with our consumers and announced it publicly this afternoon."
For more, see Sony's PlayStation Network Outage: What You Need to Know and Sony's PlayStation Network Hack: When Did They Know?
Editor's Note: This story was updated at 5:30pm Eastern with comment from Markey.