Internet privacy advocates just got one step closer to explicit legal protection.
The Senate’s Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee announced that it’s holding a hearing on May 9 to examine President Obama’s so-called “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights.”
If the Committee approves the proposal, it will introduce it to the Senate as a bill.
President Barack Obama signed the 50-page proposal in February as a set of guidelines for legislation designed to, among other things, give citizens both the right to control “what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it.” The measure also aims to create “easily understandable and accessible information about privacy and security practices.”
The Senate is also the current battleground for the hotly debated Cyber Intelligence Security Protection Act (CIPSA), which passed the House of Representatives in April. CISPA is described by its supporters as a vital and necessary national security bill, but it’s derided by critics as a means for granting the government potential access to massive amounts of private user information online.
The White House is among those critics. Echoing the language in its privacy bill of rights, it claims the cybersecurity bill violates “the fundamental values of privacy and civil liberties for our citizens” and has threatened to veto CISPA if it passes the Senate.
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