Sens. Wyden and Lummis Seek to Tighten Flow of Personal Data to Bad Actors

​From your browsing history to your physical location, every aspect of your digital footprint can be tracked and used to build a comprehensive profile of your private life – including your political, religious, and family activities, as well as the most intimate details of your personal life. This information is invaluable not only to advertisers – which want to place ads in your social media feeds – but also to governments, which often have malevolent intentions.
 
Hostile governments might weaponize your personal digital trail for blackmail or embarrassment. Imagine a CEO or inventor being blackmailed into revealing trade secrets. Or, if you work in the military or in an agency for a contractor involved in national security, your personal data might be used to disrupt your life during the beginning of an international crisis. Imagine a CIA officer receiving what appears to be an urgent message of distress from her daughter or an Air Force officer being told in the voice of his commanding officer to not go to the base but to shelter in place. And then multiply that effect by the millions of Americans in the crosshairs of a cyberattack.
 
Congress and the Biden Administration acted against these possibilities this spring by including in the Israel/Ukraine weapons appropriation measure a provision banning data brokers from exporting Americans' personal data to China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. However, this ban had notable loopholes. Adversary countries could still purchase data indirectly through middlemen data brokers in third countries or establish front companies to circumvent the ban.
 
To attempt to close these loopholes, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) have offered an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to further tighten the law by restricting data exports to problematic countries identified by the Secretary of Commerce that lack robust privacy laws to protect Americans' data from being sold and exported to adversaries. This measure will help reduce the flow of Americans’ personal data through third-parties and middlemen ultimately to regimes that have nothing but the worst of intentions.
 
PPSA applauds Sens. Wyden and Lummis for working to tighten the pipeline of Americans’ data flowing out into the world. Their proposal is a needed one and deserves the vocal support of every American who cares about privacy.