The House is taking steps to join the Senate in a crusade for stronger data privacy in Massachusetts. While giving more “teeth” to consumers by letting them take large data collectors to court, the bill the House passed unanimously on Thursday would also allow some sensitive data to be sold if the consumer agrees.
In its redraft of a bill approved by the Senate eight months ago, House lawmakers signed off on frameworks to limit collection and sale of private data, ensure consumers have a right to know about what data is being collected, opt-out of some data collection, and have their data deleted on request.
“Without exaggeration, we are living through the largest unregulated extraction of information in the history of civilization,” said Rep. Tricia Farley-Bouvier, of Pittsfield, on the House floor.
Farley-Bouvier — the House chair on the Joint Committee on Advanced Information Technology, the Internet and Cybersecurity — said “the foundation of this bill rests on a simple but powerful premise: Your personal data belongs to you, not to big tech companies, not to a data broker operating off a bot farm somewhere, not to an algorithm that has decided, based on your location history and spending patterns, what kind of person you are and what you deserve. Your data belongs to you.”
House Speaker Ron Mariano and House Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz said in a statement that the bill establishes “common-sense safeguards for sensitive data, strengthens transparency, and promotes accountability for entities that profit from personal information.”
Both the House bill and the Senate bill, which passed unanimously in September, require entities, including major tech platforms such as Meta, to limit the collection of personal data to what is reasonably necessary to provide or maintain the specific product or service that the customer wants. “Personal data” would be defined as any private information that is linked or reasonably linkable to an identifiable person.
Consumers must be given a clear opportunity to opt out of data that would be collected and processed for targeted advertising or automated profiling that could limit a person’s access to financial services, housing, insurance, education, criminal justice, employment, health care, or essential goods and services.
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Published by MassINC