Warren Leads Charge to Ban Sale of People’s Health and Location Data

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday called on the U.S. Senate to protect Americans’ “most private information” by banning data brokers from selling people’s health and location data, which is constantly collected and stored by tech companies.

Introducing the Health and Location Data Protection Act as the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to soon overturn Roe v. Wade and take away the right to abortion care for millions of Americans, the Massachusetts Democrat said “it is more crucial than ever for Congress to protect consumers’ sensitive data.”

“Data brokers profit from the location data of millions of people, posing serious risks to Americans everywhere,” said Warren. “The Health and Location Data Protection Act will ban brokers from selling Americans’ location and health data, rein in giant data brokers, and set some long-overdue rules of the road forth is $200 billion industry.”

The bill defines data brokers as any person or entity “that collects, buys, licenses, or infers data about individuals and then sells, licenses, or trades that data.”

The bill—which is co-sponsored by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—was introduced several weeks after a data firm called SafeGraph announced under pressure that it would no longer sell information about cellphone users who visit abortion clinics.

The company had been obtaining users’ location data through apps on their phones, with many people unaware that the apps were sending information about their whereabouts to a third party.

Rights advocates expressed relief when SafeGraph announced it would end such sales, but Frederike Kaltheuner, director for technology and human rights at Human Rights Watch, said the business’s actions show “what lack of data regulation means in practice.”

Under Warren’s proposal, the FTC, state attorneys general, and people whose data has been sold would be empowered to sue to enforce the provisions of the law and Congress would provide $1 billion to the FTC over the next decade to ensure it can enforce the ban.

As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, privacy advocates say the collection and storage of people’s location data could make tech companies “complicit in the criminalization of people seeking abortions in a post-Roe world.”

“Health and location data are incredibly sensitive and can be used for a range of harms, from profiling and exploiting consumers to spying on citizens without warrants to carrying out stalking and violence,” said Justin Sherman of Duke University’s Data Brokerage Project, who endorsed the bill. “Companies should not be allowed to freely buy and sell Americans’ health and location data, on the open market, with virtually no restrictions.”

Originally published at Commondreams.org, written by Julia Conley.