The Hill Publishes Op-Ed by Tom Kemp and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse
I am pleased that The Hill has published an op-ed authored by myself and Meghan Land, the executive director of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. In the op-ed, we call for states to adopt privacy laws that give consumers better rights with respect to data brokers.
Entitled “Worried about the privacy of your personal information? You should be.”, in the article we first describe what data brokers are:
Hundreds of companies, known as data brokers, scrape and collect our personal details from various online and offline sources. They aggregate this information and then sell it. We have no direct relationship with these companies — and it is unlikely most of us have even heard of them.
Then we describe what they do with our data and how they indiscriminately sell it:
A recent study from researchers at Duke University revealed just how far some data brokers will go. For as little as 12 cents per record, almost anyone can purchase intimate data on active-duty military, their families and veterans, including health, financial and religious affiliations. Even more disturbing, some of these data brokers had no problem selling this information to overseas entities. Add to that numerous reports documenting instances of location data harvested from mobile apps, sold to data brokers, combined with additional personal information, and offered to third parties to precisely track a person’s every movement.
We then describe how California has passed the California Delete Act, which gives consumers the invaluable right to request the deletion of their data from data brokers, and then call on other states to look to regulate data brokers as well:
A federal Delete Act was introduced in 2022 and again in 2023, gaining little traction. The responsibility now lies with the states to hold data brokers accountable and provide their residents with meaningful and accessible privacy rights.
Thanks to Meghan for co-authoring this op-ed, and thanks to The Hill for publishing it!