Federal data privacy laws gain support in US Congress, but critics remain

By Moira Warburton

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The push for the United States’ first major data privacy legislation has bipartisan support in a divided Congress ahead of a House of Representatives committee hearing on Thursday, although it faces criticism from businesses and privacy advocates.

The American Privacy Rights Act, co-sponsored by Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell and Republican Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, establishes a national data privacy standard that would allow people to request access to and delete their data held by companies and opt out of receiving targeted advertising. It would also create a national registry of data brokers.

The US lags behind other countries and alliances in creating such protections. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which many experts consider the gold standard for data privacy, has been in effect since 2018.

A coalition of industry groups — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and TechNet, an advocacy group that represents technology CEOs — sent a letter to Rodgers and Cantwell in early June, arguing that the proposed federal legislation lacks safeguards that would prevent Individual US states can add their own restrictions. above national politics.

“The key is to get a single unified national standard without allowing states to regulate on top of the national standard,” said Jordan Crenshaw, senior vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Center for Technology Engagement.

As it stands, “we are seeing deficiencies that would effectively make this bill a national floor,” Crenshaw said, upon which states could set their own data privacy requirements.

Privacy advocates argue the opposite — that the bill would prevent states from responding to emerging technologies.

“Federal lawmakers are being pushed to the table because of all this regulation that’s happening at the state level,” said Mario Trujillo, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties nonprofit. “If you remove the state law, in 20 years there won’t be this wave of pressure.”

Privacy experts argue that federal preemption could negate the “California effect” — a phenomenon in which California, the nation’s largest state by population, leads regulations that are adopted by other states and the federal government over time.

“Defining anything as amber is a negative for everyone, given the speed at which the technology is emerging,” Ashkan Soltani, executive director of the California Privacy Protection Agency, said in an interview.

Democratic Rep. Suzan DelBene, who represents a Washington state district including parts of Seattle where Amazon.com and other tech giants have their headquarters, said she supports the bill.

“Right now, we have a patchwork of state laws that makes it unsustainable, especially for small businesses, to be able to keep up,” DelBene said.

The bill will have a scheduling hearing on Thursday, a key step before the legislation can advance to the House floor for a vote.

(Reporting by Moira Warburton in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Matthew Lewis)