Eyeing China, US House unanimously passes bill prohibiting ‘sensitive data’ transfers to foreign adversaries
- Legislation would block sale of government-issued identifiers, financial account numbers, genetic information and private communications like emails
- Sale of such data poses ‘a unique threat to national security and individual privacy’, says bill’s sponsor Frank Pallone, Democrat of New Jersey
The US House of Representatives unanimously passed a bipartisan bill on Wednesday that would prohibit data brokers from transferring Americans’ “sensitive data” to foreign adversary countries including China.
Sponsored by Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the bill would block the sale of government-issued identifiers, financial account numbers, genetic information, precise geolocation information and private communications like emails.
The committee’s chair, Washington Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers, co-sponsored the bill.
“The breadth and scope of sensitive personal information aggregated by data brokers makes the sale of that data to our foreign adversaries a unique threat to national security and individual privacy”, Pallone said on Tuesday.
Lawmakers are concerned that the Chinese government would compel TikTok to provide US user data for surveillance or influence campaigns.
The measure also follows several stalled attempts to enact comprehensive national data privacy legislation to restrict companies’ data collection and transfer practices – something that critics of efforts to ban TikTok propose as a better solution for Americans’ data privacy.
Pallone on Tuesday said his bill represented the beginning of that process.
However, Bruce Schneier, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, said it was “unlikely” that such comprehensive legislation would pass.
Schneier welcomed Wednesday’s vote but called it “an extraordinarily minor” step in protecting Americans from countries who seek their data.
Companies and countries like China who want to buy that data will “find a middleman, unfortunately”, he said.