Why did the politician cross the Congressional aisle? A data privacy act was on the other side

What could bring Republicans and Democrats together? An unlikely political duo from Washington state has teamed up in the name of data privacy.

"This legislation would give people the right to control their personal information online by establishing a uniform, national data privacy right for Americans," Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers told Soundside. "It's really giving Americans control over where their information can go, who can sell it, and empowers individuals to enforce their data privacy rights. It protects America's civil rights and reigns in big tech."

Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell has joined forces with McMorris Rodgers to draft new legislation aimed at protecting personal data on the internet — The American Privacy Rights Act.

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The act would establish a data privacy law at a national level, instead of the state-by-state legal system currently in place. Among its many features, it would allow online users to opt out of targeted ads, as well as correct, delete, or export information that platforms have collected on them. It would also open up an avenue for people to sue businesses for violations of the proposed law.

McMorris Rodgers proposed a similar bill in 2022, which garnered bipartisan support; Cantwell was not among its supporters then. The bill failed. This time around, Cantwell is on board.

"AI is really here," Cantwell said. "Large amounts of data will be scraped off the internet for all sorts of reasons. We hope they’re good reasons like finding solutions on health care or helping our businesses be competitive … but we also know that nefarious actors could be using our personal information for things that are not good, whether that is online redlining, or prejudice against us for places we’ve visited, or somebody buying it for insurance purposes and charging us a higher rate."

Insurance companies buying personal driving data is already reportedly happening.

Cantwell said she and McMorris Rodgers spent years discussing the issue of data privacy, and how best to approach it.

"We really want to just stop the bad actors, we want to call out what we think are bad activities, and we want somebody to help enforce that," Cantwell said. "Having a statute that says consumers' information has to be protected is a very good foundational statute for the Information Age."

Many U.S. tech companies have already developed privacy standards the act addresses — they just don't use them in the United States. According to law professor Alex Alben, the companies developed the policies in response to data privacy laws passed in the European Union years ago. California's privacy laws have had a similar effect.

"People should understand that the United States is behind in privacy protection," Alben said. "We are not only behind the rest of the world, we are behind other neighboring states."

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Alben was Washington state's first chief privacy officer, from 2015 to 2019. He currently teaches cyber security at the University of Washington School of Law and the UCLA School of Law. He said he believes that companies should be asking people to opt in to sharing their data, not asking them to opt out of automatic sharing.

But this new bill would maintain the status quo in some ways: lots of pop up screens asking people to opt out of "cookies" that collect your data.

Of course, the bill would actually need to become law first.

"I think the real test is going to be: Can it come to a floor vote?" Alben said, noting the 2022 bill did not.

Alben is skeptical that the bill will come to a vote in the House or Senate, but believes it should.

"We all care about our data. We care about not being surveilled by a company or by the government," he said. "And so at its root, it seems that privacy is a basic protection that both Republicans and Democrats can get behind."

Listen to the full conversation with Sen. Cantwell and Rep. McMorris Rodgers, as well as with Alben, by clicking on the audio at the top of this article.