Data rights should protect us from the misuse of our personal data but technology companies have become increasingly hostile in their collection and monetization of our data with little respect for privacy. This trend, combined with grossly inadequate protections, is increasingly worrisome as advances in technology rapidly expands the information these companies are capable of collecting. Congress MUST enact digital privacy protections that shifts decision-making back to the people.
Our personal data is extremely valuable. This quote from the executive summary of a 2024 report on the social media industry1 helps explain how:
“By leveraging user data for targeted advertisements, where most revenue is derived, sites have been able to capitalize on the popularity of their platforms. As a result, industry revenue has surged at a CAGR of 20.3% over the past five years, including a climb of 12.0% to total an estimated $104.9 billion in 2024 alone.”
According to the same report, the “highly concentrated” industry is expected to grow to nearly 250 billion dollars within the next five years.
The data collection practices of these companies have become a subject of heavier scrutiny with ample evidence that the usefulness of targeted advertising is far outweighed by exploitative data practices occurring within these big tech companies. The FTC recently released a damning report2 that included the following quote:
The amount of data collected by large tech companies is simply staggering. They track what we read, what websites we visit, whether we are married and have children, our educational level and income bracket, our location, our purchasing habits, our personal interests, and in some cases even our health conditions and religious faith. They track what we do on and off their platforms, often combining their own information with enormous data sets purchased through the largely unregulated consumer data market.
A major contributor to the industry’s growth is in the increasing amount of data that can be collected from the devices we use to access these platforms. The amount of data that can be harvested from existing smart devices is unfathomable to the common person. Without government intervention, hardware advancements will lead to unimaginable invasions of privacy. Major players in the industry including Meta and ByteDance have made pushes into extended reality hardware, with the current generation of hardware packed with external cameras and sensors capable of mapping your entire environment and internals that monitor the movements of your eyes. The ability to measure the attention you give to content via the movement of your eyes will be worth billions to these companies and come at a huge cost to people. The conflict of interest here is apparent and will inevitably lead to extreme prejudice in advertising and addictive content curation based on increasingly intrusive data collection and analysis.
The American people do not understand or want this outcome. A nationally representative poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in May 2023 demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of US people have little understanding and serious concerns about what their data is used for and feel that they have little to no control over what data is being collected about them. 3
This section will summarize supporting evidence and public support for viable solutions, leaving room to cover solutions without solid evidence and the ugly “solutions”
This section will outline what actions we believe should be taken