Online privacy

Pledges to tackle data surveillance practices, harm to children's mental health, and tech giants' power over wide swaths of the economy haven't yet translated into passing new laws, and the clock is running out. High-profile bills that would heap new regulations on the tech industry have advanced, but they've yet to cross the finish line into law. On antitrust, the House of Representatives passed a bill in September 2022 that will raise filing fees for large mergers, using the proceeds to fund antitrust enforcement efforts.

Millions of dollars later, LinkNYC still hasn’t fixed the city’s stubborn digital divide or the privacy issues raised half a decade ago. LinkNYC, unveiled in 2014, was an ambitious plan to replace the city’s dated pay phones with “information kiosks” providing free public Wi-Fi, phone calls, device charging, and a tablet for access to city services, maps, and directions.

President Biden signed an Executive Order on Enhancing Safeguards for United States Signals Intelligence Activities (E.O.) directing the steps that the United States will take to implement the US commitments under the European Union-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (EU-US DPF) introduced by President Biden and European Commission President von der Leyen in March of 2022. Transatlantic data flows are critical to enabling the $7.1 trillion EU-US economic relationship. The Executive Order bolsters an already rigorous array of privacy and civil liberties safeguards for U.S.

California's unprecedented new law to bolster protections for abortion-related personal information held by tech companies marks a new phase in the deepening legal fight between red and blue states over digital regulations. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) signed into law an abortion rights bill with a provision that protects reproductive digital information housed by companies headquartered or incorporated in the state.

Color Of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization, launched the “Black Tech Agenda." The agenda sets an affirmative vision for how to create tech policy that centers on racial justice and ensures bias and discrimination are rooted out of the digital lives of Black people and everyone. The agenda has 6 pillars that outline real policy solutions for Congress to advance racial equity in Tech:

The White House convened a listening session with experts and practitioners on the harms that tech platforms cause and the need for greater accountability. The Biden-Harris Administration announced the following core principles for reform:

The word "competition" has a different meaning in Washington (DC) and other centers of regulation around the globe than it does in Silicon Valley. Industry leaders view acquiring startups, keeping customers inside their existing ecosystems, and trying to dominate new platforms as part of the natural process of business competition.

Charter's Spectrum Mobile service only uses geolocation information to optimize its service and does not sell to or share it with third parties, including advertisers, the company told the Federal Communications Commission. Charter assured Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel that the company has been, and will continue to be, completely transparent about its privacy practices, and explicitly requests permission to collect customer geolocation data—which Charter limits to data that will "optimize service." 

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel shared the responses from the nation’s 15 top mobile carriers following a request for information about their data retention and data privacy policies and practices. Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said:

Meta Platforms signed a $37.5 million class settlement with Facebook users who say the platform continued tracking their locations after they turned off location services on their devices, according to a filing in San Francisco federal court. The settlement by the US District Court for the Northern District of California covered about 70 million US residents who used Facebook between Jan. 30, 2015 and April 18, 2018 and who turned off the location services setting for the Facebook application on their iOS or Android devices.