By James Maroney
State Sen., D-14
James Maroney
I must admit it is exciting that much of the current conversation online is being dominated by talks of data privacy. I have been working on data privacy issues in the legislature since 2020, and often it has seemed like I was up against all the big tech companies by myself.
Technology evolves fast. As we learn more, there is always room to build on the protections we’ve put in place previously. Here’s a look at a few of the recent ones I’m most proud of.
While much of the recent conversation is dominated by talk of license plate readers, there are other ways that people have been tracking and selling your precise geolocation data. In a congressional hearing this March, the FBI admitted that it has been commercially buying the location data of American citizens, circumventing your 4th Amendment rights requiring law enforcement agencies to get a warrant for your personal data.
Starting on Oct. 1, we’re closing that loophole. Connecticut will prohibit the sale of precise geolocation data.
We have long defined precise geolocation data as sensitive data in Connecticut, which means that you would need to give your permission to someone to sell that data. I am not sure if you have ever just clicked through on a privacy policy and not known what was in it. But some people do just that, meaning they may have been allowing the sale of their precise geolocation data without even knowing it. That stops now.
There was also much uproar earlier this year when it was revealed that some supermarkets were using facial recognition to scan customers who entered the stores. We realized we needed to update our data privacy laws in order to make it clear that you could not use facial recognition to specifically identify individuals entering a grocery store, but businesses could use it to match people against a list of individuals who have been banned from the store or were known to have caused problems within the store in the past.
However, even if a business wanted to use it in this way, we said that the public has a right to know and a right to know about the business’s privacy policy and your customer rights, so we also required them to post a notice at the entrance to stores.
Many people were afraid that with rapidly advancing technology it would become possible to charge people different prices when they went into grocery stores based on the personal data a company had collected about them.
While there is no evidence that this is happening in stores, it is already happening online. Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative tested Instacart in December and found that identical carts from the same store at the same moment could differ in price by as much as 23 percent. For a family of four, that kind of gap could mean paying over a thousand dollars more per year. This is a practice called surveillance pricing, and starting next July it will be illegal in Connecticut.
All of these issues were part of recently passed Senate Bill 4. While they are all strong consumer protections, we know that technology is constantly evolving and that our laws need to do so as well. Over the coming months I look forward to explaining more of the consumer technology safeguards we passed this past legislative session and in recent years, and hearing from you on your suggestions for where we can still do more.