Senate Bill Would Bar Data Brokers From Profiting Off Location, Health Data
A new bill introduced Wednesday would ban something that a newcomer to American privacy-policy debates might think is already illegal: the sale or transfer of people’s location and health information by data brokers.
The Health and Location Data Protection Act of 2022, introduced(Opens in a new window) by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and co-sponsored by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), arrives as the Supreme Court appears ready to overturn its 1973 Roe v. Wade opinion(Opens in a new window) that established a limited nationwide right to abortion.
In a post-Roe environment, privacy advocates fear that location and medical data could be exploited by state or local governments seeking to enforce abortion bans—and which already have a history of buying location info from data brokers to avoid getting warrants for it.
The draft posted by Warren’s office is exceptionally short, running just 13 pages (PDF(Opens in a new window)), with a single-page summary (PDF(Opens in a new window)) available. It defines health data as anything that can “reveal or describe” searches for health care, details about a disability or physical or mental health condition, and treatment or diagnoses for a disability or condition. It defines location data without reference to its precision or accuracy—anything “capable of determining the past or present physical location of an individual or an individual’s device” counts.
Any data broker—defined as a company that "collects, buys, licenses, or infers data about individuals and then sells, licenses, or trades that data"—would be banned from selling, licensing, trading, transferring, or sharing those two types of data.
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