Montana Senate Passes Student and Government Privacy Bills

State senators voted 49-1 for SB-118, a student privacy bill that would let parents request deletion of their child’s education data. The American Civil Liberties Union supported the bill by Sen. Daniel Zolnikov (R) at a Jan. 23 hearing (see 2501240034).

Montana senators voted 42-8 for SB-282, which aims to prohibit state and local government from purchasing individuals’ private electronic communications and data without a search warrant. Some law enforcement officials raised concerns that the ban, proposed by Sen. Daniel Emrich (R), would make criminal investigations more difficult at a hearing last month (see 2502180025).

The Montana Senate last week approved SB-297, making substantive updates to the state’s comprehensive privacy law that took effect last October. Now pending in the House Judiciary Committee, the bill would reduce the law’s application thresholds, narrow an exemption for financial institutions, add child protections like those in Connecticut’s privacy law and half the current law’s 60-day right to cure, among other things (see 2502130054).

For businesses, Mintz privacy attorney Cynthia Larose doesn’t see SB-297 “as posing too many new challenges in the overall state privacy landscape,” she said in an email. That’s in part because lowering the coverage thresholds still doesn’t extend applicability of the Montana privacy law “to that large a universe beyond those businesses” that already must comply, she said.

SB-297 would reduce the law’s application threshold to say it applies to for-profit entities that control or process personal data of at least 25,000 Montana consumers or control or process data of at least 15,000 consumers and derive more than 25% of its revenue from selling personal data. Current law uses the figures 50,000 and 25,000, respectively.