A bill to bar data brokers and companies from selling Americans' health and location information is being pushed again in Congress, as lawmakers warn that the explosion of artificial intelligence — which thrives on vast troves of personal data — has raised the stakes, The Verge reported.
What the bill would do
The Health and Location Data Protection Act, led in the Senate by Elizabeth Warren along with Ron Wyden, Patty Murray, Sheldon Whitehouse and Bernie Sanders — with a companion bill in the House from Representative Mary Gay Scanlon — would prohibit data brokers from selling or transferring people's location and health data, according to a summary from Warren's office. It would direct the Federal Trade Commission to write enforcement rules within 180 days and provide the agency $1 billion over a decade to do so, while allowing state attorneys general and individuals to sue over violations. The ban carves out exceptions, including for data already covered by federal health-privacy law, protected speech, and disclosures a person has authorized.
Why now
Supporters frame the measure as closing a long-standing gap. The federal health-privacy law known as HIPAA covers records held by doctors and insurers, but not the sprawl of health-adjacent information generated elsewhere — search histories, period-tracking apps, fitness data — that flows freely through a data-broker market estimated to be worth around $200 billion. That information, advocates note, can be bought and sold with few limits, as The Record has reported. Concern sharpened after the Supreme Court's 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, amid fears that location and health data could be used to identify people seeking reproductive care in states where it is now restricted. The rise of AI, which ingests and monetizes personal data at scale, has given the campaign fresh urgency.
The hurdles
For all the alarm it channels, the bill faces a steep path. Its sponsors are all Democrats or independents, and it is not, at least for now, a bipartisan effort — a serious obstacle in a closely divided Congress. House Republicans have floated a different approach in the SECURE Data Act, which would set federal privacy standards and create a public registry of data brokers, and earlier comprehensive privacy bills have repeatedly stalled before reaching a vote.
The bigger picture
The dispute unfolds against a familiar American backdrop: a patchwork of privacy laws. Around 20 states now have their own comprehensive privacy statutes, but there is still no single federal law governing how data brokers handle sensitive information nationwide — meaning the protections any American enjoys depend heavily on where they live. Warren's bill is one attempt to set a national floor. Whether it can clear a divided Congress, as with so many privacy proposals before it, remains far from certain.
