Online privacy

Senate Commerce Chair Maria Cantwell (D-WA), whose panel controls the fate of any data privacy bill, stated she’s not close to supporting a major proposal recently unveiled by Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate. In addition, she said Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) has said he will not bring the current bill up for a vote in the upper chamber, signaling roadblocks for the push.

Antitrust action is desperately needed to reel in the practices of Big Tech companies, especially around privacy, according to Google's former head of advertising. Competition in tech is needed to ensure people are able to have private online experiences, because large companies like Google will never truly care about user privacy, Sridhar Ramaswamy said. Ramaswamy spent 15 years running Google's lucrative advertising business before launching Neeva, a subscription-based search engine.

A glut of major tech policy bills await action as Congress' summer recess looms — and anything that doesn't pass by then is unlikely to pass at all in a midterm election season. The ambitious tech agenda this Congress started out with 18 months ago is getting squeezed out by other legislative priorities, including gun control, the Jan. 6 investigation, and the economy. Here's what's in the queue:

Bipartisan legislation to bolster consumers’ online privacy rights gained momentum at a House hearing June 14, even as some tech industry representatives raised concerns that could slow its progress.

House and Senate leaders released a discussion draft of a comprehensive national data privacy and data security framework. The draft legislation is the first comprehensive privacy proposal to gain bipartisan, bicameral support. The American Data Privacy and Protection Act would:

The information pings around the world at the speed of a click, becoming a kind of borderless currency that underpins the digital economy. Largely unregulated, the flow of bits and bytes helped fuel the rise of transnational megacompanies like Google and Amazon and reshaped global communications, commerce, entertainment and media. Now the era of open borders for data is ending.

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina M. Khan announced that an open meeting of the Commission will be held virtually on Thursday, May 19, 2022. The following items will be on the tentative agenda:

Shopping for something online, streaming a video, or scrolling through an article all pose severe risks to personal privacy, as websites, platforms, apps, and tech companies collect massive amounts of data on their users. Just getting online in the first place, however, poses a great risk as well. Internet service providers (ISPs) are uniquely positioned to take advantage of personal data, as they have near-total access to all traffic flowing over their networks. Broadband providers routinely collect data on users’ locations, web browsing, app usage history, and more.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation performed potentially millions of searches of American electronic data in 2021 without a warrant, US intelligence officials said April 29, a revelation likely to stoke longstanding concerns in Congress about government surveillance and privacy.

In just the last few years, Europe has seen a landmark law for online privacy take effect, approved sweeping regulations to curb the dominance of the tech giants and is nearing a deal on new legislation to protect its citizens from harmful online content. For those keeping score, that’s Europe: three.