In the absence of a federal data privacy law and despite multiple state privacy regulations, the multibillion-dollar data broker industry is collecting and selling extensive personal data on Americans, including physical and mental health information on the elderly, veterans and kids.
“A staggering amount of information is collected on Americans every day, frequently without their knowledge or consent,” Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., chair of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, said at a hearing last week. “This data then gets shared, analyzed, combined with other data sets, bought and sold.”
The privacy abuses and sale of sensitive information is hurting vulnerable adults, “including the elderly, veterans and people of color,” said Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., the subcommittee’s ranking member. “But there are few things more concerning to me than the ways Big Tech, including data brokers, have proliferated the surveillance and targeting of our kids.”
