US senator introduces privacy bill that would jail CEOs for user privacy violations

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) announced today a new bill that introduces sweeping privacy protections for Americans’ private information.

Named the Mind Your Own Business Act (MYOBA), the bill includes clauses that will give Americans “an easy, one-click way to stop companies from selling or sharing their personal information” and grants consumers the right to see how companies use and share their data.

In addition, the bill goes one step further than any other user privacy legislation around the world by also introducing prison times for executives at companies that misuse user data and then lie about it to the government.

“Mark Zuckerberg won’t take Americans’ privacy seriously unless he feels personal consequences. A slap on the wrist from the FTC won’t do the job, so under my bill he’d face jail time for lying to the government,” Wyden said, referring to the $5 billion fine that FTC imposed on Facebook, and which many critics called a mere slap on the wrist.

“I spent the past year listening to experts and strengthening the protections in my bill,” Sen. Wyden said, referring to an earlier bill draft, known as the Consumer Data Protection Act (CDPA).

“[The new bill] is based on three basic ideas: Consumers must be able to control their own private information, companies must provide vastly more transparency about how they use and share our data, and corporate executives need to be held personally responsible when they lie about protecting our personal information,” the senator added.

In its current form, Sen. Wyden said MYOBA goes even further into establishing consumer privacy protections than the EU’s vaunted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Until today, the FTC usually handled user privacy slip-ups in the US. However, as FTC spokespersons told ZDNet in emails last year, the agency lacked the legal power to do anything about user data privacy abuses, other than imposing meager fines.

Sen. Wyden’s MYOBA will finally give the FTC the teeth it wanted for so many years. According to the current form of the bill, MYOBA empowers the FTC to:

1. Establish minimum privacy and cybersecurity standards.
2. Issue steep fines (up to 4% of annual revenue), on the first offense for companies and 10-20 year criminal penalties for senior executives who knowingly lie to the FTC.
3. Create a national Do Not Track system that lets consumers stop companies from tracking them on the web, selling or sharing their data, or targeting advertisements based on their personal information. Companies that wish to condition products and services on the sale or sharing of consumer data must offer another, similar privacy-friendly version of their product, for which they can charge a reasonable fee. This fee will be waived for low-income consumers who are eligible for the Federal Communication Commission’s Lifeline program.
4. Give consumers a way to review the personal information a company has about them, learn with whom it has been shared or sold, and to challenge inaccuracies in it.
5. Hire 175 more staff to police the largely unregulated market for private data.
6. Require companies to assess the algorithms that process consumer data to examine their impact on accuracy, fairness, bias, discrimination, privacy and security.

In addition, other notable clauses found in MYOBA include:

1. Strengthen the impact…

Read The Full Article