Asked during the Senate hearing whether the FBI would pick up the practice of purchasing location data again, Wray replied: “We have no plans to change that, at the current time.”
Sean Vitka, a policy attorney at Demand Progress, a nonprofit focused on national security and privacy reform, says the FBI needs to be more forthcoming about the purchases, calling Wray’s admission “horrifying” in its implications. “The public needs to know who gave the go-ahead for this purchase, why, and what other agencies have done or are trying to do the same,” he says, adding that Congress should also move to ban the practice entirely.
US lawmakers have long failed in their attempts to pass a comprehensive privacy law, and most of the bills put forth have purposely avoided the government’s own acquisition of US residents’ personal data. The American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA) introduced last year, for instance, contains exemptions for all law enforcement agencies and any company “collecting, processing, or transferring” data on their behalf. Several bills authored by Wyden and other lawmakers have attempted to tackle the issue head-on. The Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act, for example, has been reintroduced in Congress numerous times since 2011 but has failed to receive a vote.
Last month, Demand Progress joined a coalition of privacy groups in urging the head of the US financial protection bureau to use the Fair Credit Report Act (FCRA)—the nation’s first major privacy law—against data brokers commodifying Americans’ information without their consent. Attorneys who signed on to the campaign, from organizations such as the National Consumer Law Center and Just Futures Law, said the privacy violations inherent to the data broker industry disproportionately impact society’s most vulnerable, interfering with their ability to obtain jobs, housing, and government benefits.
While the 21st century’s privacy problems may have been beyond the imaginings of the FCRA’s authors 50 years ago, modern injustices tied to the sale of personal data may, they argue, still fall under its purview.
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