Biden orders crackdown on selling Americans’ personal data abroad::President Biden’s latest executive order directs several government departments to establish regulations to keep data from being sent to countries like China and Russia.
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abroad
Why not everywhere?
The US government is one of the buyers
Barring foreigners from the market gives American companies an edge. Forbidding it everywhere gives them… a blunt? Is that where the term comes from?
The President does not have the authority to outlaw selling of personal data in general. This is why it’s being limited to a select few countries of concern and not all. There are national security concerns with these countries in particular.
So they sell it all to a shell company in India, which then resells it to China. We all know how this works without actual penalties and actual enforcement. GDPR is successful because it has actual teeth, even for companies that are not HQ’d in Europe (but do business with EU citizens).
The US restricts export of certain hardware for matters of national security too, and doing it through shell corporations would get them in trouble too.
Can we just crack down on selling americans’ personal data in general?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The scale can be staggering: in a recent extreme example from a Consumer Reports study, 48,000 companies had sent Facebook data on a single user.
The data would include that related to genomics, biometrics, personal health, finances, and “certain kinds of personal identifiers.” The DOJ would also be required to work with the Department of Homeland Security to set new security standards regarding data gathered through “investment, vendor, and employment relationships.”
Finally, the Committee for the Assessment of Foreign Participation in the United States Telecommunications Services Sector would have to consider personal data threats when reviewing submarine cable licenses.
The order described by the White House’s announcement doesn’t appear to address the overall issue of the personal data market in the US, which has very little in the way of boundaries.
That leaves us with case-by-case regulatory action by agencies like the FTC, which recently banned two brokers from selling precise location data that could endanger consumers.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has been beating the drum for digital privacy for many years, cited one of those bans when he called on the NSA to stop buying location information from data brokers.
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