What Comes Next After House Passage of the Protecting Privacy in Purchases Act?

The U.S. House on Tuesday passed the Protecting Privacy in Purchases Act (H.R. 1181) by a vote of 221-201. The bill was sponsored by Rep. Riley M. Moore (R-W.Va.).

Rep. Moore’s bill would prohibit payment card networks from using a special merchant category code to identify purchases from firearms retailers. Such codes could easily become something Congress prohibits – a de facto registry of law-abiding gun owners built from financial transaction data. 

Senators might consider this not just as a Second Amendment bill close to the hearts of most Republicans, but also as a way to raise a broader privacy principle that would cover the privacy concerns of Democrats as well.

After all, financial records reveal far more than how much we spend. They can expose our beliefs, medical concerns, political interests, and personal struggles. Once a payment network creates a special category to identify one type of lawful purchase, the way is open to spy on Americans through their spending.

In this version of the bill, the protected category is firearms and ammunition.

In a wider version, it could cover purchases related to mental health treatment, addiction recovery, religious materials, reproductive healthcare, or books on controversial subjects. Americans across the political spectrum should be wary of creating new mechanisms that catalog lawful, constitutionally protected activity through payment data.

Merchant category codes were designed to classify businesses for payment processing, not to create dossiers on consumers. While the codes do not identify individual products, they can reveal that a customer patronized a particular kind of merchant. Combined with transaction amounts, locations, and other available data, they become another pixel in an increasingly detailed image of Americans’ private lives.

PPSA has long warned that government agencies can often obtain commercially available data without the warrant requirements that would apply if they collected the same information directly. As financial surveillance capabilities expand, so do the opportunities for government access, private misuse, and mission creep.
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The Senate should therefore view the Protecting Privacy in Purchases Act as more than a firearms bill. It is an opportunity to establish that payment processors should not create specialized tracking categories for Americans engaged in lawful activities involving sensitive constitutional rights or deeply personal decisions.

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