- Monday, November 6, 2023

The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Innovation, Data and Commerce subcommittee recently held a hearing on the need to better protect Americans’ data privacy rights in the new artificial intelligence era, particularly from the Big Tech behemoths.

The committee is right: Artificial intelligence, while poised to bolster efficiency, innovation, and economic growth, should be allowed to grow only if Americans can maintain their rights and retain control of their sensitive information. 

AI is pulling their data — including their sensitive information — from all corners of the web in an attempt to build and refine large corporations’ business models and user profiling algorithms.

Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal highlighted this point well. The social media giant allowed Cambridge to collect millions of users’ data without their consent so the company could perfect its political digital advertising modeling. It used AI to make its digital campaigning tools even more targeted and powerful.

Less known but equally problematic is the example of Clearview AI, a U.S. company that collected photographs of children and adults for mass surveillance, facial recognition, and personal sale. This case study demonstrates just how far companies can go in using AI to track our every move.

While AI has become the technology whipping boy of the past few years, one of the testimonies Congress heard last month made a compelling point: The problem isn’t AI. It’s the lack of a comprehensive federal data privacy standard. 

Even absent AI, for the past decade, unscrupulous companies have used and abused the fact that Congress has yet to define, enact and enforce privacy protections for today’s smart technology. Americans’ personal information is being continuously seized and monetized on too many digital channels as a result.

Drivers are victimized the second they get in their cars, especially their autonomous vehicles. These cars’ built-in sensors, cameras, microphones and GPS trackers are capturing unprecedented data about each user in what could become a $2 trillion revenue stream for the automotive industry. That’s a problem on its own, but it’s especially a concern when many of these car manufacturers have been found to have significant data security vulnerabilities.

Teenagers and families are often affected when they log in to social media websites and apps, where their information has sometimes been found to be tracked and mined without their consent.

Because minor privacy rules and statutes have not been updated meaningfully since 2013, even children are seemingly harmed by the absence of a federal privacy standard. We may have seen this when SchoolCare, a technology company used by over 3,000 schools nationally to connect students with health care services, sold itself to Findhelp, a social care company. A summer 2022 data breach that affected the information of 2 million minors followed.

The Fourth Amendment protects Americans’ persons, homes and property from undue searches and seizures. But in this digital age, shouldn’t the same protections be extended to their digital presence and property? Shouldn’t we have property rights over our data and have the authority to say who can (or can’t) use it, and under what terms?

The answer, of course, is yes, and the takeaway from Wednesday’s hearing was that Congress needs to create a federal privacy standard.

While some pending bills, such as Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal’s Kids Online Safety Act, appear poised to pass and remedy small portions of this growing problem, a more comprehensive solution should also be considered.

Some hearing participants spoke fondly of the framework presented in the American Data Privacy Protection Act, a bill that had resounding bipartisan support (and an impressive number of Democratic and Republican co-sponsors) last year but never received a roll-call vote. Perhaps Congress should consider resurrecting and reconsidering this framework in the upcoming lame-duck session.

Truthfully, however, it doesn’t matter which solution members choose. All that matters is that it’s comprehensive enough to tackle the data privacy challenges that Americans have faced over the last decade — with not only AI but also the fast-moving digital economy more generally. The fate of their rights, their peace of mind, and their data security depend on it.

• Joseph Pitts, a Republican who represented Pennsylvania in Congress from 1997 to 2017, and Ed Towns, a Democrat who represented New York in Congress from 1983 to 2013, served together on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

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