A bill with bipartisan support might finally give the US a strong federal data protection law.
is working on major tech legislation, the inboxes of tech reporters get flooded with PR emails from politicians and nonprofits either denouncing or trumpeting the proposed statute. Not so with the American Data Privacy and Protection Act. A first draft of the bill seemed to pop up out of nowhere in June. Over the next month, it went through so many changes that no one could say for sure what it was even designed to do.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the new bill is that it focuses on what’s known as data minimization. Generally, companies would only be allowed to collect and make use of user data if it’s necessary for one of 17 permitted purposes spelled out in the bill—things like authenticating users, preventing fraud, and completing transactions. Everything else is simply prohibited.
A major caveat is that the list of reasons includes targeted advertising, which is the economic driver of most commercial surveillance in the first place. So the bill falls well short of simply, which is what many data-privacy advocates would prefer. On the other hand, it imposes much stricter limits on targeted advertising—and the data collection supporting it—than any law in the US and perhaps the world.
“I think it’s a pretty fundamental shift,” says Alan Butler, executive director and president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “It gets at the heart of what I see as the major privacy problem in the way that ad tech has developed over the last 20 years, largely because there was no privacy law in effect. What’s developed is an ad tech industry that just gorges on personal information in every possible way it can, grabbing every possible piece of data they can find about people.
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