Franken Presses For place privacy invoice

via Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, November 12, 2015

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) is renewing a push for rules aimed at prohibiting firms from accumulating information about shoppers’ areas without their explicit consent.

The bill is framed as an anti-stalking measure, however would also impact app builders who acquire geolocation knowledge for ad purposes. “My law doesn’t just offer protection to victims of stalking, it might also provide customers more regulate over their very delicate location information, allowing them to decide which corporations can collect and share their vicinity,” Franken mentioned in a statement

the positioning privacy safety Act of 2015, which Franken reintroduced this week, requires that corporations obtain opt-in consent prior to accumulating or sharing place data gathered from folks’s smartphones, pills or automobiles. The measure additionally provides that firms collecting location knowledge from at least 1,000 devices publicly divulge what data they amass, who it is shared with, and how people can prevent their data from being gathered and shared.

Franken first unveiled a area-privateness invoice in 2011. The measure passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2012, however failed to achieve sufficient traction to develop into law. on account that then, Apple has taken some steps to stop firms from tracking the areas of iPhone and iPad users. last year, Apple modified its operating gadget’s WiFi scanning feature in order that it pronounces random 12-digit “media get entry to keep an eye on” identifiers — as a substitute of everlasting ones — when users turn on WiFi or Bluetooth. That transfer prevents analytics companies from tracking brick-and-mortar customers by way of their smartphones.

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