Pennsylvania should act on data privacy

While Congress continues to dither about reigning in tech companies’ profiteering on users’ data, states must pass a consumer data privacy law.

Some states already have. Pennsylvania has not. As Microsoft’s own senior director of public policy, Ryan Harkins, testified at a state House Consumer Affairs Committee hearing, the industry can’t be trusted to regulate itself.

Companies scoop up your data — basic information such as phone numbers, your web, streaming and shopping histories, even your voice and your keystrokes. They do this not only to sell you products but to change your behavior.

Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff explains. Driven by competition, companies create ever more effective behavioral-prediction products. “Ultimately,” she says, “they’ve discovered that this requires not only amassing huge volumes of data, but actually intervening in our behavior. The shift is from monitoring to what the data scientists call ‘actuating.’” These companies “develop ‘economies of action,’ as they learn to tune, herd, and condition our behavior with subtle and subliminal cues, rewards, and punishments that shunt us toward their most profitable outcomes.”

Americans have been taught for generations to fear an omnipotent surveillance state. We have not been nearly as primed to fear private surveillance. Now, experience is teaching what American culture had not: Corporate surveillance of every moment of everyday life, using the powerful tools of the digital age, is at least as threatening to liberty and privacy as anything a government bureaucracy could cook up.

Everything about who you are is for sale to the highest bidder to do what they want with. Mostly it’s about selling products and suggesting media, but there’s no telling how this data might be utilized

California led the way in 2020 with its Consumer Privacy Act. Virginia, Colorado, Utah and Connecticut have followed suit. Legislators here should study these laws and then quickly pass a version of their own. Every minute they fail to do so, “big data” gathers more data and gains more power over your lives.

Ban legislative gifts

It should be very easy for state lawmakers to pass a law barring monied interests from giving the legislators what they euphemistically describe as “gifts.” Unlike in most public policy matters, there is no positive argument for policy allowing lobbyists, special pleaders and other narrow interests to give lawmakers anything beyond their lavish, publicly funded compensation.

Yet lawmakers will not pass a law banning “gifts,” so legislators may accept just about anything from anyone as long as they report it when the booty reaches certain dollar thresholds.

Rabbi Michael Pollack of the good governance group March on Harrisburg recently expressed the frustration that all Pennsylvanians should feel about this.

“Bribery is legal,” he charged. By his count, legislative leaders have refused 33 times in the past 20 years to allow votes on bills banning legislative gifts.

Taxpayers pay legislators a base salary of more than $90,000 a year along with Bentley-level health coverage and pension benefits that would make Willie Sutton blush.

Yet legislators can’t bring themselves to ban “gifts.” A pending House bill would cap gifts at $250 rather than eliminate them. And it would ban gifts only for “non-governmental use,” a clear loophole.

The open invitation to bestow “gifts” on would-be public servants is part of the commonwealth’s foundation for poor governance, along with unlimited campaign contributions, historic gerrymandering, limited legislative transparency, lax lobbying disclosure, and on and on.

Gov. Tom Wolf imposed a “gift” ban on the executive branch in 2015. But too many legislators apparently saw that as leaving more for them.

Pennsylvanians pay legislators to work in the public interest. Lawmakers never can prove that they do so as long as they legally can accept “gifts” from narrow interests.

(Wilkes-Barre)