As the year ended, lawmakers scrambled to make progress on legislation addressing geolocation privacy and updating the Video Privacy Protection Act and the Electronic Consumer Protection Act.
Sen. Al Franken’s (D-Minn.) Location Privacy Protection Act, which would require mobile apps to receive user permission before collecting and sharing location data, was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in a voice vote. The bill now moves on to the full Senate for consideration.
Sen. Franken, Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, introduced his bill last June, but the Committee reviewed a revised version of the bill that would permit a one-time user approval and not a requirement that permission be sought each time data is shared or collected.
“If you want to find the best pizza place where you’re driving, you’ve got to provide your location,” Sen. Franken told the Minnesota Post. “If the pizza app wants your location, of course you’re going to give the pizza app your location; otherwise they can’t do what they do. But if someone else wants your location and wants your location everywhere you want to go, you might not want to give them that. So what we’re trying to say is, it’s your choice to protect your own privacy.”
The law would also criminalize “stalker apps” – applications that share the location of a cellphone without its user’s knowledge – with exceptions for law enforcement or parents monitoring their children.
Although the bill passed the Committee, it did receive some pushback. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) expressed concern that the law could “do serious damage to the tech sector.” Referencing a letter from the Interactive Advertising Bureau opposing Sen. Franken’s law, he said that informing consumers about who is receiving their information poses a practical and technological challenge.
“The mobile marketplace is a unique, yet highly complex technical ecosystem with multiple entities often behind a single service. One application may have 10 or more different entities functioning behind the scenes to enable service, ad delivery, monetization, or analytics to help improve the user experience,” according to the IAB’s letter, which Sen. Grassley submitted to the Committee for the record. “In a real-time automated delivery market, there is no technologically feasible or practical means for providing notice of each specific entity, as the entity changes in a moment’s notice.”
On December 20, 2012, the Senate unanimously passed H.R. 6671, which would update the Video Privacy Protection Act to facilitate the sharing of information regarding video rental habits on social media sites. The updated law would allow the social networking and video rental sites to integrate so that users could share with friends the movies they have rented.
The Senate Committee also gave the nod to a bill containing updates to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Changes to the ECPA would mandate that governmental authorities get a search warrant to obtain e-mails from suspects. The current law, passed in 1986, predates the rise of e-mail and other forms of technological communication, making it easy for law enforcement officials to access data without a judge’s permission. However, that update did not move forward in the House of Representatives on December 18, 2012.
Consent would expire after a two-year period or could be withdrawn at any time.
To read S. 1223, the Location Privacy Protection Act, click here.
To read H.R. 6671, the update to the VPPA, click here.
Why it matters: The movement of the bills through the Committee is viewed as progress for privacy advocates and may help speed their passage next session.
