EFF Champions State Privacy Laws in CA, VT, IL, DC, etc.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation penned a letter to Congress this month asking them *not to pass federal privacy laws* of a certain type. "We will oppose federal legislation that preempts stronger state laws" the foundation said.

Among the individual state privacy laws that have already passed, are:

• The California Consumer Privacy Act, which provides consumers with the "right to know" what personal information a company has collected about them; the right to delete that information; the right to opt-out of the sale of that information; and the right to receive equal service and pricing from a company. The law passed and will be effective in 2020.
  
  
• The Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which allows consumers to decide for themselves whether it is in their best interest to share their biometric information with companies.
  
  
• The Vermont Data Broker Act, which protects consumers from the fraudulent collection of their data and from their data being used for harassment or discrimination.
  
  
• Legislation that protects consumers from data breaches, which has been enacted by all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.
  
  
• Dozens of state laws that specifically protect the privacy of schoolchildren and prevent against the commercial use of their educational information.

The EFF letter continues:

Historically, federal privacy laws have not preempted stronger state protections or enforcement efforts. Federal consumer protection and privacy laws, as a general matter, operate as regulatory baselines and do not prevent states from enacting and enforcing stronger state statutes. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Right to Financial Privacy Act, the Cable Communications Privacy Act, the Video Privacy Protection Act, the Employee Polygraph Protection Act, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the Driver's Privacy Protection Act, and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act all allow states to craft protections that exceed federal law.

Federal privacy legislation that preempts stronger state laws would only benefit technology companies at the expense of the public.

As the saying goes, "read the whole thing", EFF's letter in its entirety can be read here.





This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.