What's your data worth to Big Tech? Bill would compel answer
WASHINGTON (AP) — As Congress bears down on big tech companies, two senators want to force giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon to tell users what data they're collecting from them and how much it's worth.
The legislation floated Monday by Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., goes to the heart of the tech giants' lucrative business model: harvesting data from platform users and making it available to advertisers so they can pinpoint specific consumers to target.
"When a big tech company says its product is free, consumers are the ones being sold," Hawley said in a statement. "These 'free' products track everything we do so tech companies can sell our information to the highest bidder and use it to target us with creepy ads. Even worse, tech companies do their best to hide how much consumer data is worth and to whom it is sold."
The measure would require commercial services with more than 100 million active monthly users to disclose to their customers and financial regulators the types of data they collect. They also would have to provide their users with an assessment at frequent intervals of the data's value to them.
It comes as bipartisan support grows in Congress for a privacy law that could sharply rein in the ability of the biggest tech companies to collect and make money from users' personal data. At the same time, a House panel has opened a bipartisan investigation of Silicon Valley's market dominance.
The Internet Association, the tech industry's major trade group representing Facebook, Google and dozens of other tech companies including Netflix and Airbnb, said Monday that it supports a comprehensive data privacy law.
"Data helps businesses, across all industries and of all sizes and business models, provide consumers with better products and services," the group's president and CEO...