Time and time again, people have been calling on their elected officials to do more to protect their online data. And, with each call, it falls on deaf ears as these politicians continue to make money from people who profit on said data. Then, out of nowhere, comes a popular app that collects little data and draws Americans from American made apps. Fear campaigns insue, politicians become more racist than usual, and bills become introduced. One of those bills just passed through the US House of Representatives with no pushback.
Let’s talk about House Bill 7520
This bill is known as The Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act. This bill was introduced to prohibit the selling of an American citizen’s data to America’s enemies, namely Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea.
I almost feel like I’ve seen these names before. In fact, I have. These are the same countries that were named in the recently House-passed TikTok ban (but don’t tell anyone it’s a ban). This one is dealing with a bit of pushback as some folks don’t want to see it go through for a myriad of reasons.
However, HR 7520 saw none of that. All 414 members of the House voted to pass this bill. And that’s rare. The House had 95 votes at the time of writing this and they’ve only unanimously agreed 5 times.
But let’s not go out celebrating yet. Remember that the bill only restricts who the data can be sold to. This doesn’t stop data brokers from collecting all the data and selling it to only God knows who. This means that anyone from a country we do business with could totally flip the data to people we don’t.
Again, the best method to protect our data in the US would be to stop the collection of the data in the first place. But our elected officials will never listen to us.
I mean, we’re six months into arming a country to ethnically cleanse another. They weren’t listening to begin with.
Source: The Verge
