Biden White House Targets Data Brokers With Executive Order
The US White House under President Joe Biden says it will issue a new executive order Wednesday in an effort to protect Americans’ personal information and stop data brokers from selling this information to “countries of concern.”
The order will allow the US Attorney General to “prevent the large-scale transfer of Americans’ personal data to countries of concern and provides safeguards around other activities that can give those countries access to Americans’ sensitive data,” the announcement reads.
The White House believes companies are collecting and selling Americans’ data now more than ever, and is concerned that this personal data, which can include genetic, financial, health, and personally identifiable data, could end up in the hands of foreign intelligence or military operations.
Biden wants the US Department of Justice to regulate the use of Americans’ personal data as well as better protect military and government-related data. The President also wants telecommunications firms to be more aware of how American data could be put at risk by submarine cables abroad, and wants to make sure that federal contracts, grants, and awards don’t lead to “countries of concern” getting ahold of US residents’ and citizens’ data.
While the announcement is a first step toward better efforts to protect Americans’ data at the federal level, it doesn’t specifically state what nations are “countries of concern,” nor does it suggest specific regulations or requirements for protecting data. It also doesn’t call for an end to data brokers, either. It’s likely, though, that “countries of concern” would include any nations currently sanctioned by the US, like Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria, and North Korea.
The current lack of federal regulation around the sale of consumer data is a cause for concern, researchers say. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a nonprofit US organization established in 1994 to prevent mass surveillance and other abusive data practices, writes on its website that regulation to protect consumers from companies harvesting user data is “desperately needed” in the US. It finds that “thousands of data brokers” are selling billions of data pieces on Americans with “virtually no oversight.”
At the state level, 12 US states have created their own laws to help protect consumer data, however, including California, Oregon, Montana, Texas, Colorado, and Florida.
Such federal regulation has been demanded for years. A US Federal Trade Commission report released a decade ago found that Americans don’t know when their data is being sold, nearly everyone in the US’s data is being sold, and called for the US government to force data brokers to provide Americans with transparent information about who is selling their personal information—and what data is for sale.
