In congressional testimony last month, facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he would support regulation of his own company.
Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and John Kennedy, R-La., have now taken him up on the offer, introducing a bill, S. 2728, to impose broad new restrictions on how Facebook and other social media companies can collect and handle consumer data.
Taking Facebook to Task
The legislation—dubbed the Social Media Privacy Protection and Consumer Rights Act—was no surprise. Klobuchar and Kennedy had made clear weeks ago that they were planning to propose federal intervention in social media markets.
The goal was to address privacy concerns raised by the acquisition and use of consumer data from Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica data firm.
“We can do it the easy way or the hard way,” Kennedy bluntly stated regarding his regulatory plans, adding, “I do not want to regulate Facebook half to death, but we do have … problems we've discovered.”
The bill is a grab bag of mandates and restrictions on how social media networks operate. The most widely discussed provision is a requirement that social media platforms use “plain English” in their user agreements, so consumers can better understand them.
As Kennedy succinctly put it to Zuckerberg: “Your user agreement sucks.”
That line was memorable and garnered quite a bit of attention for the Louisiana lawmaker. But the irony is that Congress is hardly in a position to lecture private companies on the plain use of the English language, as anyone who has ever read congressional legislation can attest.
It's About the Data
The meat of the bill, however, is not linguistics, but limits on the collection of consumer data by Facebook and other social media platforms.
Among its provisions, the bill would require social media networks by law to disable consumer data tracking and collection (when so requested by a user); to provide notice of a data breach within 72 hours; to delete user data when asked; and to provide copies of what has been collected about them.
