Maine advances privacy law amid new immigration data collection concerns
d3sign via Getty Images
Maine lawmakers are moving ahead with a plan for a comprehensive data privacy law that would amount to some of the strictest consumer protections in the country.
This story was originally published by the Maine Capital Star.
Maine lawmakers are moving ahead with a plan for a comprehensive data privacy law that would amount to some of the strictest consumer protections in the country.
For the past several years, the Maine Legislature has debated how aggressive the state should be in protecting consumer privacy online. But competing proposals — along with sizable behind-the-scenes influence from lobbyists — have left the state still without a comprehensive policy.
The majority of the Democratically controlled Maine House of Representatives threw its support behind a proposal on Tuesday, LD 1822, that closely mirrors a new law in Maryland. The Senate is set to take it up Thursday, though subsequent enactment votes will be needed in both chambers and history shows they can certainly reverse course.
When Maryland’s law took effect in October, that state deviated from the more than a dozen others that have adopted a model favored by industry groups. The sponsor of the bill advancing in Maine, Rep. Amy Kuhn (D-Falmouth), pushed off the decision on her bill in order to first see how the implementation of Maryland’s similar law went.
What’s come to bear: businesses of all sizes in Maryland have been able to continue targeted advertising, Kuhn said. Potential restrictions to that type of data-driven marketing has been the key reason businesses are opposed to the stricter proposal.
Meanwhile, Rep. Rachel Henderson (R-Rumford), who had put forth an industry-favored, competing bill last year that the Legislature rejected, said a few months of data is not sufficient to draw that conclusion.
“We won’t really know the full scope of the impact of that bill for years to come,” Henderson said.
There are also new considerations Kuhn is urging her colleagues to consider regarding a need to act quickly, including the use of data in immigration operations.
As President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign has gotten underway, federal immigration agencies have significantly expanded their use of geolocation, biometric data and Artificial Intelligence surveillance tools to track people in real-time, often without warrants. This tracking has also been done on bystanders and protesters, including U.S. citizens, near immigration arrests.
“This is contrary to longstanding protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution,” Kuhn said, “and I would submit that consumers did not knowingly consent to that.”
Maine is now seeing an uptick in immigration operations in the rural parts of the state, following a surge in the two largest cities last month.
Henderson said immigration concerns seem to be the “flavor of the month” when it comes to the political divide.
“This is its own independent issue, one that we’ve talked about for years,” Henderson said, “and it’s time to enact a privacy law. This one takes it way too far.”
Other concerns Kuhn raised on the House floor include retailers using surveillance pricing to set different prices for different customers on the same items and the use of children’s data that makes them vulnerable to exploitation.
Another bill from Kuhn this session seeks to regulate explicit AI-generated images of children.
This bill, LD 524, passed with unanimous bipartisan support in the Senate on Tuesday and will next head to the House.
Child sexual abuse material is illegal under both state and federal law, but the advancement of AI created loopholes. The bill being considered would expand the crime of disseminating child sexual abuse material to apply to materials that have been created or modified through generative AI or machine learning.
Maine Morning Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maine Morning Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lauren McCauley for questions: info@mainemorningstar.com.