Privacy laws in the US had momentum at the beginning of 2020, but the pandemic has focused Congress elsewhere and forced everyone to give up more data online
and will with any article that suggests the reason why we are where we are is the result of a lack of will on the part of consumers—but a good rundown nevertheless. https://www.vox.com/... Evan Greer / @evan_greer : “chickens being force fed on factory farms just don't care about eating a healthy diet, smh.” https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
US privacy legislation entered 2020 with real momentum, then the pandemic pulled Congress's pandemic-era privacy attention toward emergency measures like the COVID-19 Consumer Data Protection Act while the broader legislative push stalled. The same crisis that froze the bills also expanded the data exhaust: remote work, remote school, and contact-tracing-style tools made sharing personal data a condition of daily life.
That dynamic lands on top of an older pattern the related coverage documents — businesses have collected, sold, and reused personal data for decades, with Google and Facebook making the process more visible through ad targeting rather than inventing it. The Vox piece argues the stall wasn't consumer apathy so much as coercion of circumstance, a framing Evan Greer sharpens with her factory-farm analogy about 'choice' under constraint.
First-order effects
- Consumers now surrender more personal data as a default condition of participating in work, school, and commerce online, with no federal baseline governing what happens to it.
- The legislative window that existed at the start of 2020 closed for the year: the bills in play were narrowed to pandemic-specific proposals rather than comprehensive privacy law.
Second-order effects
- Platforms and data-dependent businesses face no new compliance pressure during the exact period their collection volumes spike, widening the gap between practice and any future rulemaking.
- Advocacy groups like Fight for the Future's Evan Greer gain a sharper argument against 'consumer choice' framings — the pandemic demonstrated that consent extracted by circumstance isn't meaningful consent, complicating industry defenses built on opt-in models.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US privacy law arrives later but under worse starting conditions: each year without a federal standard normalizes higher data collection, raising the adjustment cost for whatever framework eventually passes.
- The stalemate reinforces the framing debate captured in earlier coverage — whether regulation should treat privacy as something to protect or as a trade-off for benefits — which will shape whether future laws regulate collection itself or merely disclosure of it.
The trend: US privacy legislation is falling further behind actual data-collection practice, with crises accelerating extraction faster than Congress legislates constraints.