bdpatoday® | regulation

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senators Mark R. Warner (D-VA) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced the Designing Accounting Safeguards to Help Broaden Oversight And Regulations on Data (DASHBOARD) Act, bipartisan legislation that will require data harvesting companies such as social media platforms to tell consumers and financial regulators exactly what data they are collecting from consumers, and how it is being leveraged by the platform for profit.

“When a big tech company says its product is free, consumers are the ones being sold. These ‘free’ products track everything we do so tech companies can sell our information to the highest bidder and use it to target us with creepy ads,” said Senator Hawley. “Even worse, tech companies do their best to hide how much consumer data is worth and to whom it is sold. This bipartisan legislation gives consumers control of their data and will show them how much these ‘free’ services actually cost.”

“For years, social media companies have told consumers that their products are free to the user. But that’s not true – you are paying with your data instead of your wallet,” said Senator Warner. “But the overall lack of transparency and disclosure in this market have made it impossible for users to know what they’re giving up, who else their data is being shared with, or what it’s worth to the platform. Our bipartisan bill will allow consumers to understand the true value of the data they are providing to the platforms, which will encourage competition and allow antitrust enforcers to identify potentially anti-competitive practices.”

As user data increasingly represents one of the most valuable, albeit intangible, assets held by technology firms, shining light on how this data is collected, retained, monetized, and protected, is critical. The DASHBOARD Act will:

Require commercial data operators (defined as services with over 100 million monthly active users) to disclose types of data collected as well as regularly provide their users with an assessment of the value of that data.
Require commercial data operators to file an annual report on the aggregate value of user data they’ve collected, as well as contracts with third parties involving data collection.
Require commercial data operators to allow users to delete all, or individual fields, of data collected – and disclose to users all the ways in which their data is being used. including any uses not directly related to the online service for which the data was originally collected.
Empower the SEC to develop methodologies for calculating data value, while encouraging the agency to facilitate flexibility to enable businesses to adopt methodologies that reflect the different uses, sectors, and business models.

The DASHBOARD Act is the second tech-focused bill Hawley and Warner have partnered on. The first was Hawley’s Do Not Track Act, which would be modeled after the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) “Do Not Call” list and allow users to opt out of non-essential data collection.

— Source: senate.gov

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

#BDPACon19 convenes August 1-3, 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia — bdpa2019.com

WASHINGTON — Now under attack by POTUS, meet the new wolves of ‘K Street’.

Ahead of tech executives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter heading to more hearings in front of the U.S. Senate, in this video Loup Ventures’ Gene Munster discusses what he expects to hear from these powerful companies.

What are their new agenda items, hidden or otherwise? Legacy policies have eroded, our data and privacy are next to non-existent, artificial intelligence (Ai), social media, and search engine optimization (SEO) algorithms (“algos“) matter—regulations are inevitable.

M&A: A merger or an acquisition? How soon could artificial intelligence and machine learning subsume legislative processes and ‘become one’ with Federal, State, and Local lawmakers when governing bodies can no longer fully embrace software-defined ecosystems, cybersecurity challenges, nor keep pace with new technologies? ‘Swiping left‘ or ‘swiping right‘ for proposals, bills, and votes in near real-time are distinct possibilities with human-in-the-loop machine learning.

Bail-Out: Oversight committees and regulatory demands for discriminatory algorithms, pleas for open source software, or mandatory transparency for pseudo-code or source code will not bode very well for search engine and social media business models.

When industry’s “Secret Sauce” no longer remains secret nor immune from new laws and regulations, alternative value propositions will respectfully be requested from lawmakers and appropriators by lobbyists, stakeholders and shareholders in order for powerful applications and algorithms to preserve industrial dominance across all industry sectors.

Powerful trends toward digital transformation, end-user empowerment, and global policies such as the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are just the beginning.