The Shaky Future of a Post-Roe Federal Privacy Law

For the past few years, New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand has called for the creation of a new Data Protection Agency. “The whole theory behind the Data Protection Agency is we wanted to actually create a privacy harm—a definition of a privacy harm—and then create an agency that was going to oversee different platforms to make sure they weren’t undermining people’s privacy or stealing their data without their permission,” Gillibrand says. “I think people can understand the right to privacy as a meta issue that they care deeply about, whether you’re a libertarian, whether you’re conservative, or whether you’re a liberal,” Gillibrand says. “I think for many people, they’re just putting their heads in the sand and saying, ‘Oh, this doesn’t relate to me.’ Unfortunately, that’s not what the language of the decision says.” With Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer fully embracing the status quo they inherited via an apathetic congressional fiat, it’s still unclear which, if any, of these competing privacy measures could attract the necessary bipartisan support. “But I’m a pretty big fan of encryption because otherwise you don’t have any ability to control your own data.” Madam Speaker In this dystopian post-Roe reality—one where the most intimate reproductive details of millions of Americans are being sold to brokers for portions of pennies or being passed from Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyers to local cops—Democratic leaders, from Pelosi and Schumer to Senate Commerce Chair Maria Cantwell, continue imperiling the chances of this Congress passing even basic data privacy protections.