More companies could soon be covered by a Texas data broker law because of two Texas amendments to the statute that take effect on Monday.
Though California is the leader in privacy legislation and regulation, other states are stepping up their enforcement actions, said a blog post last week by McGuire Woods lawyers. Recent actions by Connecticut and Nebraska attorneys general "highlight an important shift: states beyond California are not only enacting laws aimed at safeguarding privacy, they are taking action to demonstrate that those laws have teeth," they wrote.
Amid rising regulatory scrutiny over AI-based therapy, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) opened a probe into Meta, Character.AI and other chatbot platforms “for potentially engaging in deceptive trade practices and misleadingly marketing themselves as mental health tools,” the AG’s office said Monday.
A federal privacy statute is badly needed, and the timing is right to pass one now, said Chris Oswald, executive vice president and head of law, ethics and government relations at the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). He spoke Tuesday during a panel on data privacy at the group's Masters of Data Conference.
Companies should master the fundamentals of privacy, which will form a solid foundation when handling new privacy regulations, enforcement actions and emerging technologies like AI, said Sourcepoint’s Chief Privacy Officer Julie Rubash and Brian Kane, the chief operating officer of the privacy software company that was recently acquired by Didomi (see 2507080040).
Though many states have fallen short in filling gaps in federal privacy protections for health and genetic information, a few are trying, said Orrick lawyers in a Friday blog post. The lawyers said that public interest in genetic data is on the rise, though the recent 23andMe bankruptcy proceedings exposed concerns about what information is protected and what is not (see 2506100051 and 2506180018).
Vermont’s compliance this week with the Trump administration’s request for information about Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants angered the sponsor of the state's comprehensive privacy bill.
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The Senate Privacy Subcommittee is focused on the Judiciary Committee’s jurisdiction over privacy legislation, but expect collaboration with the Senate Commerce Committee, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., told us Thursday. Other senators offered views on the White House's plans to work with tech companies to build a healthcare data-sharing system (see 2507310067).
So far in 2025, state lawmakers and regulators have focused on data related to health, children, geolocation and biometrics, said Sidley privacy attorneys Colleen Theresa Brown, Sheri Porath Rockwell and Sasha Hondagneu-Messner in a blog post Thursday.