The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that would ban third-party data brokers from selling Americans’ user data to geopolitical rivals such as China and Russia.While it still needs to pass the Senate to become law, it’s a step in the right direction as recent headlines have focused on US may ban TikTok
Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act, Human Resources 7520The unanimous vote of 414-0 on Wednesday would prohibit data brokers from selling or disclosing Americans’ private information to any foreign adversary or “any entity of a foreign adversary.”
However, the bill is narrowly targeted and only applies to third-party data brokers. The legislation does not prohibit U.S. tech companies like Meta, Apple or X from doing almost anything they want with the user data they collect. The ban also prohibits data brokers from sharing “sensitive information,” which includes things like genetic information, precise geolocation data, and private communications such as emails and text messages.
The new law also bans the sharing of information such as Americans’ Social Security numbers, passport numbers and driver’s license numbers, although it’s entirely possible that countries like Russia and China already have such information, as ruthless Network attacks we only understand long afterward.
as a political newspaper notesThe fate of this new data privacy legislation is uncertain in the Senate, which must also decide whether to take up the bill to force ByteDance to spin off TikTok. The bill would force TikTok to shut down if its Chinese parent company is unable or unwilling to sell. It is worth noting that the new bill that the House of Representatives passed unanimously on Wednesday is more unified than the so-called TikTok ban bill that passed last week with a vote of 352 to 65.
Supporters of the new legislation passed Wednesday argue that passing a TikTok ban would be foolish as long as the law still allows private data brokers to sell U.S. users’ data to China and Russia. This new legislation will fix that loophole. Or it would if the Senate decided to accept it.
The bill is sponsored by Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Washington.