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Privacy: Big Tech Lobby States to Support Weak Data Privacy Laws
Privacy laws in the US are currently weak and scattered.
Amie Stepanovich, executive director at the Silicon Flatirons Center at Colorado Law, said that “currently, privacy laws are a cluttered mess of different sectoral rules. Historically, in the US we have a bunch of disparate federal and state laws that either look at specific types of data, like credit data or health information or look at specific populations like children, and regulate within those realms.”
There are no federal laws that standardize how companies need to respond if your data is exposed in a data breach. What laws do exist are scattered: they include provisions found in HIPAA, FCRA, FERPA, GLBA, ECPA, COPPA, and VPPA. Most states don’t enforce any privacy laws and allow companies to share or sell any day that is collected without any notification.
Kevin Thomas, the Long Island Democrat who chairs the Senate Committee on Consumer Protection, said that “there’s no oversight. States have to stand up because there’s no regulation, and it’s not going to come from the federal government, as divided as this country is right now.”
States have tried to adopt privacy laws, but have been largely slow in doing so. Only California, Virginia, Colorado and Utah have enacted digital privacy laws. And in many of the other states, the introduction of privacy laws is being heavily influenced by technology companies.
The law in Virginia is much weaker than the one passed in California and was the result of heavy lobbying by Microsoft and Amazon. Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Google have all spent large amounts of money in order to lobby for weak state laws to govern privacy.
Caitriona Fitzgerald, Electronic Privacy Information Center Deputy Director, said that “the existing laws are so basic, it’s like 5 percent of what we need to do on privacy. Because we really are at a crisis point. The problem with the state bills getting passed is now state legislators will feel like they did something for privacy when really, they have not. What we’re seeing is the industry push weak laws now so that they can pat themselves on the back and say that ‘the privacy bill got passed’ while it’s just the minimal rights for users and consumers.”
