These questions stem from the following article:
- Your phone knows you’re at the doctor, and data brokers are profiting from it.
More than 92 percent of patients in a 2022 American Medical Association survey said they thought their health data should not be available for purchase. But many people might not realize that when they are sitting in a hospital, an abortion clinic, or an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a church basement, the location data emitted from their mobile phones isn’t covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which protects patient privacy.
“Data brokers typically are just hoovering up data from the open web and then buying it from anybody,” he said.
The U.S. government has begun to penalize some companies that track Americans when they visit health facilities and places of worship. But privacy and legal experts don’t think actions against a few companies will stop an entire industry built on scooping up Americans’ private data. They’re calling on more states or Congress to ban advertisers from tracking Americans’ locations via their phones.
But progress has been fitful. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, on Sept. 27 vetoed a bill that would have blocked the sale and sharing of location and other sensitive personal data, saying it went “a step too far.” And a recent study from Stanford University showed that only 9 percent of data brokers are adhering to an existing California privacy law that gives consumers the right to delete their data, correct personal information and learn what personal records the business is selling.
In January, Consumer Reports released model legislation giving state lawmakers a framework to ban or limit the sale of geolocation data, which uses GPS to identify a person’s movements in real time. Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon and Virginia have already banned the sale of precise geolocation data. But digital advertisers have also lobbied states to block such proposed limits.
Related Questions:
- What is a data broker?
- What is a broker? What types exist?
- Outline the development of brokers as a profession.
- What laws govern how brokers operate? Provide a timeline for how these evolved.
- Breakdown the laws covering brokers into national, state, and local.
- What licenses are necessary in order to work as a broker? What groups over see them?
