California, Connecticut, Virginia, and more than a dozen other states attorneys general are rallying against a federal data privacy bill they said would shrink the rights of more than 100 million Americans, as well as restrict their enforcement powers.<\/p>\n
The states\u2019 coalition of Democrats, led by California\u2019s Attorney General Rob Bonta, urged Congress in a letter<\/a> Tuesday to reject the SECURE Data Act (H.R. 8413), federal legislation introduced in April<\/a> that would create a national data privacy standard\u2014and largely override states\u2019 privacy laws. <\/p>\n Democrats and consumer advocacy groups have also raised concerns with the proposal, which they said would leave consumers with fewer protections online. But the legislation has garnered strong support from companies and trade organizations that say it will ease business compliance. More than a 100 state and local chambers of commerce urged Congress to advance the bill in their own letter to the committee<\/a> Tuesday.<\/p>\n A House Energy and Commerce Committee<\/a> panel held a hearing on the bill<\/a> Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n State enforcers pushed back on the legislation\u2019s preemption provision, which they said would leave \u201cthe data privacy field frozen in time\u201d until Congress amends or updates its law. The legislation would also make it more difficult for users to express their privacy choices, weaken limits on businesses\u2019 use of consumer data, and restrict states\u2019 enforcement powers, the letter said. <\/p>\n \u201cFederal action to protect Americans\u2019 privacy is essential, but not at the expense of the strong state laws that already protect Californians,\u201d Bonta said in a press release Wednesday. <\/p>\n The SECURE Data Act would threaten not just 20 state comprehensive privacy laws, but also laws that protect the home addresses of judges and police officers, create data broker registries<\/a>, and shield patients\u2019 medical information from disclosure, among others, the states\u2019 officials said. <\/p>\n The states\u2019 attorneys general and consumer protection authorities pointed in the letter to other federal privacy laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the Children\u2019s Online Privacy Protection Act as examples of regimes with limited preemption that set a national floor and allowed states to enact their own laws.<\/p>\n California\u2019s privacy agency has separately opposed the bill<\/a> in a letter<\/a> to the House Energy and Commerce Committee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"California, Connecticut, Virginia, and more than a dozen other states attorneys general are rallying against a federal data…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":345341,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,3208,141778,138878,17432,138875,14959],"class_list":["post-345340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-cybersecurity","tag-federal-privacy-legislation","tag-health-data-privacy","tag-law-enforcement-officers","tag-medical-records","tag-preemption"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345340\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/345341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}