Thune

On October 20, 2014, a bipartisan group of senators sent a letter to U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) and Ranking Member John Thune (R-S.D.), requesting that the Committee schedule a “general oversight and information-gathering hearing” on digitally connected technologies before the end of 2014.

The letter, penned by Sens. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), Cory A. Booker (D-N.J.), Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), and Brian Schatz (D-Hi), stated that the connected devices industry is expected to generate global revenues of $8.9 trillion by 2020, and that its importance would soon be felt by millions of Americans with the “proliferation of connected products” and “the upcoming holiday season.” The industry, however, raises a number of important policy questions in the areas of “consumer protection, security, privacy, technical standards, spectrum capacity, manufacturing, regulatory certainty, and public-sector applications,” the letter said.
Continue Reading Senators Request Hearing on Connected Devices

Yesterday, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing entitled, “What Information Do Data Brokers Have on Consumers, and How Do They Use It?”   Committee members expressed interest in bringing about greater transparency to what information is collected by data brokers and how it is used at the hearing, which consisted of a single panel of witnesses from the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, the World Privacy Forum, Experian, and the Direct Marketing Association.

In advance of the hearing, Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV) released a majority staff report summarizing the Commerce Committee’s investigation into how data brokers collect, compile, and sell consumer information.  The staff report notes that data brokers serve a beneficial function in enabling companies to provide customers with products and services specific to their interests and needs, but that certain data brokers “operate with minimal transparency” and that consumer profiling can raise “unintended privacy issues.”  For this proposition, the staff report cited media reports that a major retailer had developed a pregnancy prediction model to enable the company to target marketing towards expectant mothers. 

According to the Committee’s staff report, a perceived lack of transparency may present further concerns when data broker information “end[s] up in the hands of predatory businesses seeking to identify vulnerable consumers, or when marketers use consumers’ data to engage in differential pricing.”

Senate Commerce Committee members generally echoed these concerns at yesterday’s hearing.  For example:Continue Reading Senate Panel Examines Data Broker Industry; Releases Staff Report