Conor Dougherty

Now that Republicans are in charge, the federal government is poised to roll back regulations limiting access to consumers’ online data. States have other ideas. As on climate change, immigration and a host of other issues, some state legislatures may prove to be a counterweight to Washington by enacting new regulations to increase consumers’ privacy rights.

Illinois legislators are considering a “right to know” bill that would let consumers find out what information about them is collected by companies like Google and Facebook, and what kinds of businesses they share it with. Such a right, which European consumers already have, has been a longtime goal of privacy advocates.

The docks at the Port of Oakland are a tangle of cranes, shipping containers, railroad tracks and snaking lines of trucks waiting to load and unload cargo. Streamlining this kind of traffic is one of the few ideas Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton agree on. Clinton has said that if she is elected president, her administration will seek to spend $250 billion over five years on repairing and improving the nation’s infrastructure — not just ports but roads, bridges, energy systems and high-speed broadband — and would put an additional $25 billion toward a national infrastructure bank to spur related business investments. Trump said he wanted to go even bigger, saying his administration would spend at least twice as much as Clinton.