Climate Change

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, this bill is, on its surface, a privacy bill. It appears to have been introduced 2 days ago, and the sponsor has arrived on the floor of the Senate and says that this bill ought to be passed immediately and without debate.

My guess is that a small circle of beltway insiders have seen the text, but I just want the Senator to know that passing this bill this way would just make a mockery of the proposition that we ought to have open, public debate on significant laws. We are dealing with a rush job here.

I will just tell you that based on what we have picked up, the legislation certainly leaves more questions than answers.

First, who does the Senator from Louisiana intend to target with the bill? On a first reading, it could apply to anybody, from Glassdoor, to Spotify, to Cloudflare, to my neighbor's blog, to local media outlets.

At a higher level, if my colleague wants to protect Americans' data from collection and abuse, this bill certainly doesn't do that. On the contrary, his legislation would push the platforms to simply force users to consent to their data being collected and used as a condition of using their service. That is already being done now, and this bill wouldn't change a thing for Americans' privacy.

Very significantly, our reading is that the Kennedy bill only requires consent if user data is both collected and used by the same company, and it has a massive loophole for data brokers and other shady middlemen who are already compiling dossiers of Americans' sensitive data and selling it to just about anybody with a credit card.

For the last several years, I have been blowing the whistle on these data brokers and these shady middlemen. We have investigated sector after sector where we are seeing these people who really adhere to some of the sleaziest business practices engaging in these tactics where they can get their hands on Americans' sensitive data and basically just sell it to anybody with a credit card.

I guarantee you, there is not a Senator in this body who is going to go home this weekend and tell their constituents: Gee, I want those data brokers and those middlemen to be able to sell my sensitive data to hither and yon, whatever nefarious purposes somebody might want to buy it for.

The Facebooks, the Googles, and the Twitters of the world have all the resources to pay these guys to outsource their data collection and be A-OK. Yet again, as I have said for some time, it is the startups and the little guys who are going to be left behind.

I have been working on these issues since I came to the Senate, and the only person here, really, who knew how to use the computer was the wonderful Senator from Vermont, Senator Leahy. So as we began to write these formative laws, I said that my interest is the startup and the little guy because the big guys always do great.

That is why, when we were on the floor talking about the change to 230 before, who sold out the little guys? Facebook. And all that happened was the bad guys went off to the dark web.

So this is another bill where the Facebooks and the Googles all have the resources to pay the guys to outsource data collection, as I have been talking about, and the little guy is going to be left behind.

This bill does not require consent to collect your data. It doesn't require consent to use it and follow you around the internet. It wouldn't stop Chinese companies from harvesting American data and selling it to the Chinese Government.

If the Senator from Louisiana wants to protect Americans' sensitive data, I have a bill for doing that. I have comprehensive privacy legislation. It is called the Mind Your Own Business Act. We have been soliciting input on it literally for years. It is the toughest bill in terms of holding the executives actually accountable, for example, if they lie about their privacy policy, if an executive of one of the major companies, generating billions in revenue, lies about their privacy policy.

The Mind Your Own Business Act is the bill that is the toughest in terms of protecting the consumer. It sets tough privacy and cyber security standards for companies that collect Americans' private data, gives the Federal Trade Commission more authority to issue serious fines, and it is backed up with the strongest enforcement provisions on offer if a CEO lies to the government.

It is not as if you can't write tough privacy proposals. It certainly can be done, and others have ideas on how to do it.

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