Online privacy

The House Energy and Commerce Committee's Republicans announced a comprehensive legislative draft that establishes a national privacy standard to protect Americans and sets clear rules for consumer privacy and data security in the US.

The Federal Trade Commission has outlined a far-reaching vision for protecting consumers’ privacy online, but the plan faces numerous challenges.

Sen Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) introduced the Digital Accountability and Transparency to Advance (DATA) Privacy Act to strengthen data privacy protections for American consumers. The legislation would:

45 civil-rights, media-democracy and consumer-advocacy groups called on Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan to initiate a rulemaking to safeguard privacy, promote civil rights and set guardrails against the abuse of data online. Discriminatory and abusive data practices are prevalent across the digital economy, the groups wrote

A special signal known as global privacy control tells every website you visit not to pass around your personal data behind your back. Global privacy control is already tucked away in Web browser Brave and browser add-on DuckDuckGo. Soon, the Firefox browser will be adding it. Firefox says it’s rolling out the global privacy control signal to its main product in the next two or three months, according to Chief Technology Officer Eric Rescorla. Chrome users, however, must continue to wait.

As Democrats attempt to shrink their social spending plan by hundreds of billions of dollars in order to reach consensus between moderates and progressives, the fate of several of its tech provisions hangs in the balance. House Democrats included a boatload of technology and telecommunications cash in the original $3.5 trillion version of their spending package, which the party is planning to pass without GOP support under a process called reconciliation.

Many internet service providers (ISPs) collect and share far more data about their customers than many consumers may expect—including access to all of their Internet traffic and real-time location data—while failing to offer consumers meaningful choices about how this data can be used. This report details the expanding scope and some troubling aspects of some ISP data collection practices.

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan announced that an open meeting of the FTC will be held virtually on Thursday, October 21, 2021. The open meeting will begin at 1 pm EST and will be followed by a time for members of the public to address the FTC. Staff will present some findings from evidence gathered pursuant to the 2019 6(b) orders issued to six Internet service providers and three of their advertising affiliates in regards to their privacy practices. The public release of the report is subject to commission vote.

As major tech companies have announced policy changes intended to protect young users online in response to a new United Kingdom children’s privacy law, Sen Edward Markey (D-MA) and Reps Kathy Castor (D-FL) and Lori Trahan (D-MA) wrote to the Federal Trade Commission urging the agency to use its full authority—including its authority under Section 5 of the FTC Act—to ensure these companies comply with their new policies.

Privacy advocates cheered the Federal Trade Commission’s decision to revive its rarely used “penalty offense authority” against for-profit colleges that make misleading or deceptive claims, a move that shows the agency is expanding its enforcement options after the Supreme Court gutted its authority to seek monetary damages from companies that engage in illegal conduct.