Privacy

By stoking fears that law enforcement agencies could use health, search, and location data from mobile apps to prosecute women who illegally obtain abortions, anti-tech groups are distracting from real opportunities for bipartisan progress on privacy rights for Americans.

Rob and Jackie sat down with David Deming, the Academic Dean and a Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, to discuss the importance of data, data sharing, and ways to protect individual data privacy.

Congress’ top priority as it seeks to pass comprehensive data privacy legislation should be striking the right balance between protecting consumer privacy without overly complicating compliance or restricting productivity and innovation.

Join ITIF for a panel discussion on whether and how the FTC or Congress should update COPPA to protect children’s privacy while increasing the quality and quantity of online services for children.

The UK’s Online Safety Bill fails to preserve users’ rights to legal free expression and privacy in the digital space and will actually exacerbate privacy and content moderation concerns online.

The drafters have included several poorly conceived compromises on state preemption and a private right of action that fail to meet the standards of what is needed in a federal data privacy law. But the bill does offer a comprehensive framework for data privacy that serves as a blueprint for federal legislation, and it is worth exploring the pros and cons of these other provisions.

The release of a bipartisan draft bill is a welcome development after years of delays and discussion and is the most hopeful sign that Congress will finally address this issue. Unfortunately, the compromise text failed to adequately address the two most contentious issues in the debate about a federal privacy law: state preemption and a private right of action.

While scrutiny of metaverse platforms is essential to ensure a safe, equitable, and inclusive environment, policymakers should be cautious of rushing to regulate the metaverse, such as by eroding intermediary liability protections or restricting the use of “algorithms” because allowing platforms the freedom to experiment and innovate will best position them to address new challenges.

“Defending Digital” Series, No. 4: Claims that Big Tech is making too much money off of “our data” are wrong in two fundamental ways: The data about most individuals isn’t worth very much—and when consumers use a business service, the resulting data isn’t “theirs.”