The Big Tech-sponsored Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) recently released a document called ‘A Grand Bargain on Data Privacy for America’ in an effort to sway federal legislators into pushing a bill that would dilute or even remove data privacy rules already imposed by individual states.
Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) blew the whistle on ITIF and said that “Big tech cannot be trusted to write its own rules.”
Nate Swanner tells more about the ‘Grand Bargain’ in this excerpt from Dice:
Being backed by big tech isn’t always a negative, but a dive through the ‘grand bargain’ policies suggests there’s some heavy big-tech oversight here. In a nutshell, the document wants to repeal and replace existing data privacy laws with its own proposals, and goes so far as to suggest the policy pre-empt state laws.
Specifically, it wants to rescind existing federal laws on data privacy, exempt “de-identified” data (such as the ‘anonymous’ data Google and Facebook sell to advertisers) and publicly available information (which seems designed to thwart a ‘right to be forgotten law’ stateside). If that wasn’t enough, it also removes limits on data transfers across borders, and includes nine unique points to either “protect innovation” or “minimize compliance costs for U.S. organizations.”
This ‘grand bargain’ would mean California’s strict new privacy act would go away. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which governs how your personal health data is handled and transferred, would also disappear. The Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) would both vanish, as well.
