Online privacy

In our increasingly digitized world, it is critical to protect individuals’ privacy. As policymakers consider passing meaningful privacy legislation, civil rights protections are a critical but mostly overlooked component. To have effective privacy legislation, we must ensure that companies’ data practices do not violate individuals’ civil rights—especially when it comes to marginalized communities.

Protecting privacy is especially important for marginalized communities, who are disproportionately harmed by the exploitation of personal information enabled by inadequate privacy protections.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s new tech task force leader, Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), wants to use her perch to hold tech companies accountable.

The Trump administration's policy toward big tech moved in two opposite directions recently, as the White House sought the big platforms' help in predicting mass shootings while it was also reportedly drafting plans to punish them for perceived bias. On Aug 9, the administration invoked the help of Google, Facebook and other companies to detect and deter mass shooters before they act. Meanwhile, the White House has circulated a draft of a new executive order aimed at imposing new restrictions on tech platforms' freedom to moderate the content users contribute.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) sent a letter to major US telecommunications companies AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon urging them to lower the amount of sensitive data they store on customers. Those large pools of data present a significant hacking risk, Sen Wyden argued. "Your companies collectively hold deeply-sensitive information about hundreds of millions of Americans. It should come as no surprise that this data is a juicy target for foreign spies," he said.

Lawmakers are working through the August recess to cobble together legislation on data privacy after missing a deadline they set to unveil a bill before the summer break. Advocates for a federal data privacy standard are feeling a time crunch as they fret over the limited number of days left in this session and the upcoming 2020 elections. Most importantly, CA's strict new privacy law is slated to take effect in Jan, raising the stakes for lawmakers who were hoping to pass a federal law before the stringent state-level rules go into place.

Over the past few years, the major US mobile carriers have been in the spotlight over allegations that they have been selling their subscribers’ real-time geolocation data, including highly precise assisted GPS (A-GPS) information designed for use with “Enhanced 911” (E911).  Today, broadband providers that also provide telecommunications services are not subject to any comprehensive federal privacy law.

The new reality for big tech companies: Scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers has become a constant. For the past few years, American regulators appeared to be lagging as authorities around the world have stepped up their actions to crimp the power of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The contrast was starkest with European officials, who have passed laws and imposed a series of large penalties against big tech companies. But in recent months, American lawmakers and regulators have also ramped up their activity.

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Facebook for making misleading disclosures regarding the risk of misuse of Facebook user data.  For more than two years, Facebook’s public disclosures presented the risk of misuse of user data as merely hypothetical when Facebook knew that a third-party developer had actually misused Facebook user data.  Public companies must identify and consider the material risks to their business and have procedures designed to make disclosures that are accurate in all material respects, including not continuing to describe a risk as hypothetical when it ha