Privacy & New Media

Push for Internet Privacy Rules Moves to Statehouses

3 04 2017

Push for Internet Privacy Rules Moves to Statehouses

3/26/2017

Conor Dougherty

New York Times

In the face of the Senate’s rollback on regulations preventing ISPs from monetizing information like a user’s browsing history, states like Illinois are now making moves towards increasing protections of their citizens’ privacy. In the case of Illinois, a “right to know” bill is in considering, which would “let consumers find out what information about them is being collected by companies like Google and Facebook, and what kinds of businesses they share it with.” Additionally, Illinois is looking to restrict smartphone tracking by applications in addition to audio recordings from TVs and wifi-enabled personal assistants.

Obviously, other states could easily look to these laws should they be passed, hopefully spreading further than just Illinois. This would additionally make it more difficult for companies to work around, requiring specific features on a per-state basis. These laws, of course, fly in the face of what large corporate entities like Microsoft lobby for.

While I’m appreciative of local state legislature for privacy, these laws feel a lot more like band-aids than legitimate solutions for the US. Protecting only a fraction of the country on a state-by-state basis is not ideal in that it creates pockets of lowered privacy. While it sounds ideal that other states may simply just adopt laws that Illinois or California have recently begun to push for, these regulations are the kind that should benefit all Americans, rather than just Illinoisans or Californians. If the majority of states prove that privacy is important to them and both the left and the right can prove that they can come together on these issues, there’s no reason that it should not just be the law of the land.

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