The persistent surveillance under which most Americans reside appears likely to continue unabated after federal lawmakers pulled from consideration on Thursday a privacy bill that legal experts contend has little hope of protecting anyone’s privacy.
United States lawmakers who’ve flirted for years with the idea of offering Americans a semblance of control over their own data yanked at the last moment the latest iteration of a “comprehensive” privacy package that’s been subject to continual editing and debate for the better part of a decade. The bill, known as the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA), was scheduled for markup Thursday morning by the House Energy & Commerce Committee (E&C), which holds jurisdiction over matters of commercial surveillance.
The decision to cancel the hearing came amid news that House GOP leaders had vowed behind closed doors to scuttle the bill whether it was approved by the committee or not. But while the power of the pen ultimately rests in Republican hands, eighty-sixing Thursday’s session has also saved many Democrats from having to make the difficult decision to support a bill that was recently stripped of crucial civil rights protections.
The APRA, which promised to establish a “federal consumer privacy framework,” was constructed upon the bones of various other bills introduced in Congress over the past decade—a litany of doomed efforts to shield Americans from the invasive monitoring and data-hogging practices of a largely unregulated commercial surveillance industry.
The bill aimed to impose a slate of new duties on corporations actively gobbling up Americans’ private data by requiring them to provide, amend, and even delete said data upon request, as well as minimize their collection by installing various opt-out and consent-based mechanisms; it would also put in place new transparency rules and data security standards. With each successive failure to pass such a law, however, a greater portion of the US economy becomes dependent on corporations closely monitoring the daily goings-on of its users, practices that today impact some of the most consequential facets of their lives—the attainment of choice housing, health care, and employment, to name only a few.
The morass of delays only serves to further entrench the power of US corporations to monitor the most minute details of people’s lives, while helping to paint profitable surveillant activities as both an “inevitability” and net positive for mankind.
While Republicans who staunchly oppose the most rigorous of protections—favoring, as they say, a more “pro-business” approach—held the real power to decimate the bill, House Democrats have been under intense pressure as well to see it dead. As one reporter familiar with the bill’s trajectory through the House described the text on Wednesday: “Everyone hates it.”
APRA had by Tuesday lost the support of dozens of major privacy and civil liberties groups across the country. Organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Democracy & Technology stated they could no longer support APRA after E&C lawmakers this week cut several key provisions aimed at protecting vulnerable members of society from discrimination and harmful byproducts of AI-driven technologies.