Connecticut and Texas lawmakers drafting consumer privacy bills face direct, funded opposition from Facebook, Apple, and Google, whose lobbyists can shape exemptions and enforcement carve-outs before bills reach a vote.
Second-order effects
State-level resistance pushes the companies to scale up everywhere at once — the pattern that culminates in record federal budgets like Amazon's $20.3M and Meta's $20.1M in 2021 lobbying spend, while industry groups offer their own frameworks such as the opt-in proposal their lobbying group floated back in October 2018 to pre-empt harder mandates.
Third-order effects
If state legislatures keep advancing privacy bills despite the lobbying, the US heads toward a patchwork of state privacy regimes rather than a single federal law — raising compliance costs for the platforms and giving whichever states legislate first outsized influence over national defaults.
The trend: US consumer privacy regulation is being fought state-by-state, with Big Tech's lobbying shifting from proposing its own frameworks to systematically blocking or diluting legislation in legislatures nationwide.
NEW: Big Tech is quietly pushing to protect itself from you at the state level. Watered-down “privacy” legislation is being ushered through 14 statehouses. The goal? Preempting greater protections. @ToddFeathers reports. https://themarkup.org/...
Warning! 20 states are considering tech-friendly privacy bills; 14 modeled after new VA law based on language from @Amazon & @Microsoft that exempts many companies, makes it harder to opt out & doesn't allow consumers to sue. h/t @ConnectEdProf https://themarkup.org/...
Big Tech is seeding watered-down “privacy” legislation in states. 14 of 20 proposed state privacy bills were built upon the same framework as a Microsoft and Amazon-supported bill in Virginia—or were even weaker, reports @toddfeathers in @themarkup https://themarkup.org/...
👀 Brilliant article on the state of privacy laws in the US and the power of #bigtech lobbying. This should concern us all. How big capital trumps the interests of the people. By @themarkup https://themarkup.org/...
While Americans are coming together to demand a truly just and equitable future for this country, Big Tech and their partners in government are wielding the latest technologies to shore up unjust systems and maintain their position at the top. https://themarkup.org/...
Meanwhile in the USA, big tech is LITERALLY writing data privacy laws for statehouses to hobble the necessary effort to achieve better adequacy with the GDPR. https://themarkup.org/... https://twitter.com/...
Weak privacy bills are being pushed by tech companies across the country, and in some cases have even become law. “Setting up these weak foundations is really damaging and really puts us in a worse direction on privacy in the U.S.,” says EFF's @htsuka https://themarkup.org/...
Interesting overview of the privacy #patchwork2021 wars (though it's also worth acknowledging the California laws are also opt-out frameworks without private enforcement). https://twitter.com/...
14 of 20 proposed US state privacy bills “were built upon the same industry-backed framework as Virginia's, or weaker”, “backed by a who's who of Big Tech-funded interest groups” and being “shepherded through statehouses by waves of company lobbyists”. Very important reporting: h…