Private companies and the federal government are both collecting enormous amounts of personal data, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders warned on Sunday evening, adding that public policy has not evolved rapidly enough to protect digital privacy rights.
“It is not only the government that we have to worry about, it is private corporations,” the Independent Vermont senator warned during the Democratic presidential debate aired on NBC. “You would all be amazed … about the amount of information that private companies and the governments have in terms of websites that you access, products that you buy, where you are this very moment,” he added. “It is very clear to me that public policy has not caught up with the explosion of technology.”
His comments came in response to a question about whether companies in Silicon Valley should be forced to share more information with the government, especially in terms of encrypted communication.
“What we have got to do there is, among other things … have Silicon Valley help us to ensure that information being transmitted through the Internet or in other ways by [the Islamic State] is in fact discovered,” Sanders said.
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“But I do believe we can do that without violating the constitutional or privacy rights of the American people,” he said.
