When California and 19 other states passed their own data privacy laws, the predominant focus was to protect consumers from overzealous marketers hoovering up and misusing their data.
But now people are also concerned about how data might be misappropriated by foreign hackers or state actors, which adds another layer of urgency – and complexity – to discussions of a potential federal privacy law.
Senator Ron Wyden, speaking Sunday at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Springs, detailed his stance on data privacy, a federal privacy law, consumer data brokers and, for good measure, his thoughts on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg cozying up to President Trump. (“I thought it was god awful,” he said.)
Salty
“Who here has heard of Salt Typhoon?” he said. Hands in the audience stayed lowered. Salt Typhoon refers to the Chinese government’s hack of US telecom companies that was discovered late last year.
“Many of the most conservative members of the Senate think it constitutes the biggest hack in American history,” Wyden said, who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Privacy is an “urgent” issue, Wyden said, because technology exposes more of our private interactions than ever before. Before everyone kept computers in their homes and pockets, many consumers had a measure of protection “because technology couldn’t reach [them],” he said. “Those are basically gone now.”
He offered, for example, someone having a conversation with their spouse over the weekend about perhaps going out to buy blinds, and 15 minutes later they’re flooded with ads from people selling blinds.
He also railed against data brokers, calling it “outrageous” that they are “sending your information across the world” – another data privacy critique with a national security angle.
Data brokers “are pillaging people’s private files,” he said. “I’ve been trying for a long time to rein them in.”
Can progress be made?
Wyden, a Senate Democrat, indicated that data privacy can be a rare issue where coalitions form across the aisle. He said he was “proud” to vote for Republican leader Marco Rubio, who was just confirmed by the Senate as Secretary of State.
“He’s one of the few guys in the United States Senate who recognizes something’s really out of whack when all these foreign threats, all these foreign companies, have your personal data,” Wyden said.
He questioned whether Tulsi Gabbard, the pick for the US intelligence chief, would be an ally to questions of data privacy as they relate to national security, citing a reversal on her position on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
And Wyden didn’t even bring up TikTok, which still faces a ban for national security reasons, during the onstage chat.
While TikTok has 75-odd days, the timeline on a federal privacy law is even more open-ended.
“You’ve got to take the longer view,” Wyden said about the timeline for a federal privacy law.
He is currently focused on the Algorithm Accountability Act, which focuses on regulating algorithms. Unlike platform businesses themselves, algorithms are not protected under Section 230, the 1996 law Wyden co-authored, which releases platforms from liability for content on their platforms.
Consumer data points
There are three consumer data elements that Wyden said he is particularly focused on for privacy protections.
“We want to protect people’s health care data, people’s education data and people’s job data,” Wyden said. If other politicians share his interest in focusing on these categories, laws more narrowly regulating those categories could come in advance of a general federal privacy law.
