Two senators have crossed party lines to push a bill that would improve safeguards for Americans’ personal data after months of congressional scrutiny over the practices of businesses from credit bureau Equifax to social media giant Facebook.
The Social Media Privacy and Consumer Rights Act from Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and John Kennedy, R-La., would give consumers the right to disable data-tracking and collection, require terms of service to be written in plain language, and mandate that users be informed of data breaches within three days.
“Every day, companies profit off of the data they’re collecting from Americans, yet leave consumers completely in the dark about how their personal information, online behavior and private messages are being used,” Klobuchar said in a statement.
User data is important to social media firms, in particular, since they use it to connect lucrative advertising customers with a carefully tailored market of potential buyers. Many users, however, don’t realize how their interactions on such platforms reveal preferences for travel destinations, restaurants, and even clothing designers.
Despite agreeing to often-complex terms of service before downloading the apps, they’re surprised when data breaches occur as well as by how much information they’ve consented to sharing with developers of linked programs.
Only a month ago, Facebook told users it had fixed a bug that may have given outside apps unintended access to the photos of 6.8 million users, increasing momentum for a privacy bill that had been mounting since the discovery that a consultant on President Trump’s 2016 campaign improperly gained access to information on 87 million users.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg subsequently testified in a series of harsh congressional hearings, just as the former CEO of Equifax did in late 2017 after hackers stole personal identification data from nearly half the U.S. population.
Search engine provider Google and social media platform Twitter have also faced scrutiny from lawmakers. Google admitted sharing data on its 1.4 billion email users with outside app developers but told senators inquiring about its security practices that it only does so when affected Gmail account holders agree.
Sen. John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, joined Roger Wicker, chairman of the subcommittee on communication and the Internet, and Jerry Moran, chairman of the subcommittee on consumer protection and data security, in a July 10 letter inquiring into a Wall Street Journal report that hundreds of developers had been given access to Gmail accounts for purposes such as identifying ad markets.
“The full scope of the use of e-mail content and the ease with which developer employees may be able to read personal e-mails are likely not well understood by most consumers,” the senators said.
While tech companies support the idea of uniform standards as Congress weighs privacy breaches, they’re keen to avoid some of the restrictions imposed in the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and the state of California.
“I don’t want to regulate Facebook or any private social media company, but these platforms continue to compromise their users’ private data,” Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican who had accused Equifax of failing to guard a “digital Fort Knox,” said in a statement. “In today’s world, private data is the equivalent of our personal identities, and companies need to know that they’ll be held accountable when they violate the public’s trust.”
While the bill’s full text wasn’t immediately available, the package described by the lawmakers seems like a “very incremental, common-sense type of legislation,” said Shane Green, the head of digi.me, a platform designed to give users more control over their data.
While competing measures are likely, Green told the Washington Examiner, the proposal reflects the increasing odds that a privacy bill will be enacted this year. Indeed, William Barr, Trump’s nominee to succeed Jeff Sessions as attorney general, was questioned closely on the matter by Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, during his confirmation hearing this week.
Barr said he’s particularly interested in privacy — “the question of who owns this data” — and believes the Justice Department should involve itself in such questions more often.
Google didn’t immediately return a message seeking comment on the proposal, while Twitter declined to comment. Facebook said it recognizes the value of such regulations.
“We support strong and effective privacy legislation in the U.S. that gives people the right to control their information — like the rights to access, deletion, and portability,” a spokeswoman said Friday. “We are committed to working with policymakers to get it right.”
Twitter climbed 1.3 percent to $33.27 in New York trading on Friday, while Facebook rose 1.2 percent to $150.04 and Google added 0.8 percent to $1,098.
