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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has proposed a federal privacy law that would preempt tougher privacy rules issued by states.

Rubio's announcement Wednesday said that his American Data Dissemination (ADD) Act "provides overdue transparency and accountability from the tech industry while ensuring that small businesses and startups are still able to innovate and compete in the digital marketplace."

But Rubio's bill establishes a process for creating rules instead of issuing specific rules right away, and it allows up to 27 months for Congress or the Federal Trade Commission to write the actual rules.

In addition, the bill text says it "shall supersede" any provision of a state law that pertains to the same consumer data governed by Rubio's proposed federal law. That includes names, Social Security numbers, other government ID numbers, financial transactions, medical histories, criminal histories, employment histories, user-generated content, "unique biometric data, such as fingerprint, voice print, retina or iris image, or other unique physical representation," and other personal data collected by companies.

[...] Rubio's bill wouldn't do much to protect Americans' data privacy, consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge said. The Rubio bill uses the Privacy Act of 1974 as its framework; the 1974 law applies to federal agencies, but Rubio's bill would apply similar rules to the private sector.

[...] The Act "can generally be characterized as an omnibus 'code of fair information practices' that attempts to regulate the collection, maintenance, use, and dissemination of personal information by federal executive branch agencies," the DOJ says in an overview last updated in 2015. "However, the Act's imprecise language, limited legislative history, and somewhat outdated regulatory guidelines have rendered it a difficult statute to decipher and apply."

Despite the DOJ saying the law is confusing, Rubio argued in an op-ed for The Hill that the Privacy Act of 1974 is "widely considered one of the seminal pieces of privacy law in effect today."

[...] Congressional Democrats recently proposed a much stricter privacy law, which could issue steep fines to companies and send their top executives to prison for up to 20 years if they violate Americans' privacy.

-- submitted from IRC

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