Vermont-Proposed Daniel's Law Held to 2026, Says Bill's Author
A possible Vermont version of Daniel’s Law (H-342) is “not dead, but it is not moving,” state Rep. Monique Priestley (D) said Thursday on Vermont Perspective, a radio show on WDEV. After the show, Priestley told us in a phone interview that another piece of legislation, her comprehensive privacy bill, remains “very much in play.”
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Meanwhile, the House Commerce Committee considered changes Wednesday to the version of Priestley’s age-appropriate design code bill that passed in the Senate (S-69), and on Thursday conducted a walkthrough comparison of Priestley’s comprehensive privacy bill (H-208) and the industry-backed version won Senate approval (S-71).
Priestley, who sponsored H-342, said that it’s not likely to move this year, but could carry over to next year’s session without having to start from scratch procedurally. H-342 passed the House last month and is currently in the Senate Judiciary Committee (see 2503280028). It is based on New Jersey's Daniel's Law, which aims to protect the information of certain public officials and their families. It's controversial because it's resulted in extensive litigation (see 2504040031).
In 2024 and 2025, data privacy legislation "has faced the strongest lobbying that people had ever seen" in the Vermont legislature, said Priestley, who also spoke about her fight against lobbyists in an interview with Privacy Daily last week (see 2504250033).
The House Commerce Committee is comparing H-208 and S-71 Wednesday, but Priestley didn't expect votes, she told us afterward. On the kids code bill, she said that her committee seemed generally supportive of an amendment she proposed at Wednesday’s hearing. However, the committee has since received additional amendment requests, so action on S-69 is paused for now, she said.
The changes to S-69 are mostly definitional and respond to a recent ruling against California’s age-appropriate design code law (see 2504140058), Priestley said at the hearing. One big change, removing a coverage threshold meant to carve out small businesses, came in response to a previous committee discussion, she said.
In response to the California court decision, the amendment drafters removed one of the indicators that a website is reasonably likely to be accessed by a minor: "online product, service or feature contains advertisements marketed to minors." The court indicated that might be too broad, said legislative counsel Rik Seghal. Also, the amendment drafters modified the definition of social media to remove "a fairly broad exception" for platforms that mainly consist of sports, entertainment or interactive videogames, said Seghal.
In addition, the draft amendment proposes removing the definition of sensitive data, plus terms that were part of that definition, including consumer health data, neural data and precise geolocation data. Also, the amended definition of minor would now remove “and is a resident of the state” from the definition of minor, meaning that a company wouldn’t have to check for that while confirming ages. Companies could also keep an age range of a customer, rather than simply a finding of whether they are minor, under the amendment.
Moreover, the amendment would update the definition of personal data to call out that the data could be linked to a person “along or in combination with other information.” In addition, a processor would now include, in addition to a covered business, "another processor" or a federal, state, local or tribal government, under the proposed change.