Caitriona Fitzgerald, EPIC Deputy Director, writes:
Americans faces a data privacy crisis. For more than two decades, without any meaningful restrictions on their business practices, powerful technology companies have built systems that invade our private lives, spy on our families, and gather the most intimate details about us for profit. Through a vast, opaque system of databases and algorithms, we are profiled and sorted into winners and losers based on data about our health, finances, location, gender, race, and other personal characteristics and habits.
Last year, in a significant step towards changing these harmful business practices, bipartisan leaders on the House Energy & Commerce Committee and Senate Commerce Committee proposed the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA). The bill went through extensive negotiations between members of Congress of both parties, industry, civil rights groups, and consumer protection and privacy groups. ADPPA received overwhelming bipartisan support in the House Energy & Commerce Committee, where it was favorably approved on a 53-2 vote.
Unfortunately, Congress failed to enact ADPPA last session, but state legislators can now take advantage of the outcome of those negotiations by modeling a state bill on the bipartisan consensus language in ADPPA. EPIC has crafted the State Data Privacy and Protection Act to provide that opportunity.
Read more at EPIC.org.