EFF Fights on for 'Long Overdue' U.S. Privacy Bill
The Electronic Frontier Foundation expects an "onslaught" of privacy issues in Congress this year, said Maddie Daly, EFF assistant director-federal affairs, in an interview with Privacy Daily. Some of EFF's top priorities, including a national privacy bill, may be "idealistic," but it's still important to push for them, Daly said.
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Just after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, EFF released a 64-page memo to his administration and Congress outlining priorities for privacy, free expression and technological innovation. “We sent a similar transition memo in 2021, to the Biden administration and to Congress, outlining our priorities and what we would like the administration and Congress to accomplish,” she said. “So, this is our second time ... [and] we found it very useful in outlining EFF priorities to both Congress and an incoming administration.”
“We've already started talking to folks on the Hill about this document ... and what we would like to see various congressional leaders and committees put forth and to give feedback and recommendations on what they're working on,” Daly said. “There's going to be an onslaught of issues related to privacy and otherwise, and we want to make sure that what we're giving is constructive and tailored and specific to the issues that we have real expertise on, both from a legal and technological standpoint.”
One of EFF's top priorities is “robust, comprehensive federal data privacy legislation.” That sort of legislation “would give a lot of room to build on for the issues that we see in a lot of the work that we do, whether that be in automobile privacy ... [or] facial recognition and the criminal justice context, in democracy-preserving efforts." Without a robust data privacy bill "that protects all Americans, you don't have a lot of ground to stand on." She added, "It would address a lot of the concerns that we've seen in the past few years ..., but honestly, for a very long time. This is long overdue.”
Other focuses include age-verification and digital IDs policies, said Daly, adding that these are relatively recent issues. “We're pretty concerned about the privacy and equity issues that come up when talking about digital ID,” she said. “We ... worked with the Biden administration, and we hope to continue to work with the Trump administration on these issues … laying out concerns that may not be at the forefront when legislators or agency officials are drafting rules and regulations around this.”
Daly also wants “to raise the equity issue” with digital identification. “We want to raise the right to a physical document, not just a digital one, and the privacy issues that can come up when you talk about this extent of data sharing and the retention of such personal, official data.”
EFF is concerned that lawmakers' push to implement age-gating proposals could burden access to lawful speech online and the open internet. Additionally, “our concern is increased surveillance, that in order to know who's a kid and who's an adult on the internet, you're going to need to have a lot more information about internet users, and that has a real effect of chilling speech” and raising privacy concerns. EFF has this concern with the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), she said.
In terms of privacy areas outlined in the 2021 memo to the Biden administration that still carry weight today, artificial intelligence is a priority. While “the way we think about AI now is different than the way we thought about it before,” EFF “want[s] to see some strong rules around transparency and development of AI use in a government context, because of the immense power that it can hold if you're adjudicating people's rights based on these tools that really aren't fully baked yet.”
Daly predicted that a recommendation about not renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will “get a lot of traction." She noted, “It's up for reauthorization in 2026, it's been subject to a lot of concern with Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination" to director of national intelligence, "and we think that there's been a lot of increased interest in taking a look at warrantless surveillance and really examining what legal authority the intelligence community has to conduct these sorts of warrantless surveillance of US citizens.”
While Daly admits some of EFF's proposals, such as the broad consumer privacy bill, are "potentially idealistic ... there are certain issues in" its memo, for example, "on facial recognition technology, on 702 reform, that have a lot of interest from congressional members.”