Sen Wyden Introduces Comprehensive Bill to Secure Americans’ Personal Information and Hold Corporations Accountable

Sen Ron Wyden (R-OR) introduced sweeping new privacy legislation, the Mind Your Own Business Act, to create the strongest-ever protections for Americans’ private data and to hold accountable the corporate executives responsible for abusing our information. Wyden’s bill contains the most comprehensive protections for Americans’ private data ever introduced, and goes further than Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It would give American consumers an easy, one-click way to stop companies from selling or sharing their personal information, give consumers radical transparency into how corporations use and share their data, and impose harsh fines and even prison terms for executives at corporations that misuse Americans’ data and lie about those practices to the government. The Mind Your Own Business Act protects Americans’ privacy, allows consumers to control the sale and sharing of their data, gives the FTC the authority to be an effective cop on the beat, and will spur a new market for privacy-protecting services. The bill empowers the FTC to:

1. Establish minimum privacy and cybersecurity standards.
2. Issue steep fines (up to 4% of annual revenue), on the first offense for companies and 10-20 year criminal penalties for senior executives who knowingly lie to the FTC.
3. Create a national Do Not Track system that lets consumers stop companies from tracking them on the web, selling or sharing their data, or targeting advertisements based on their personal information. Companies that wish to condition products and services on the sale or sharing of consumer data must offer another, similar privacy-friendly version of their product, for which they can charge a reasonable fee. This fee will be waived for low-income consumers who are eligible for the Federal Communication Commission’s Lifeline program.
4. Give consumers a way to review the personal information a company has about them, learn with whom it has been shared or sold, and to challenge inaccuracies in it.
5. Hire 175 more staff to police the largely unregulated market for private data.
6. Require companies to assess the algorithms that process consumer data to examine their impact on accuracy, fairness, bias, discrimination, privacy and security.