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Senator Peters Presses for Consumer Data Privacy Protections - video
Craig Routzahn
Thu, 02 May 2019 06:28:15 EDT
U.S. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan Wednesday highlighted the need to strengthen privacy protections as consumers increasingly utilize data and technology apps for daily needs. During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing examining data privacy expectations, Peters questioned experts about what more must be done to protect consumers' data and highlighted recent reports of pregnancy applications sharing personal data and data brokers attempting to sell the personal information of over 1.2 million children. Currently there are no federal restrictions on sharing personal information collected on mobile apps, such as health records. In addition, there's a lack of federal oversight, transparency and accountability for data brokers, which amass information about consumers and then work to sell that data to other companies and or individuals. Peters qeustioning of the Commerce Secretary can be viewed below.
"The issue of protecting privacy, given the explosion of data from technologies - with the ability to collect vast amounts of data - will be one of the defining issues of this decade," said Senator Peters. "With data comes power, and that power is based on data collected from all of us individually. We need to ensure protections are in place so that consumers know whether or not their sensitive, personal information can be shared or sold."
Peters has advocated consistently to strengthen consumer protections. In the wake of the Equifax breach in 2017, Peters pressed for a Federal Trade Commission investigation into whether Equifax misled consumers with false claims of cybersecurity integrity and failed to maintain adequate security protocols to protect consumer data - an investigation the FTC announced shortly after Peters' letter. The Equifax data breach exposed the Social Security numbers and personal identification information of more than 145 million Americans, including more than 4.6 million Michiganders.
