Eyeing China, US House unanimously passes bill prohibiting ‘sensitive data’ transfers to foreign adversaries

The US House of Representatives unanimously passed a bipartisan bill on Wednesday that would prohibit commercial vendors from transferring Americans’ “sensitive data” to foreign adversary countries including China.

After clearing the House by a 414-0 vote, the legislation now needs to be passed in the Democratic-controlled Senate and signed by US President Joe Biden to become law.

Sponsored by Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the bill would block the sale of government-issued identifiers, financial account numbers, genetic information, precise geolocation information and private communications like emails.

The committee’s chair, Washington Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers, co-sponsored the bill.

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“The breadth and scope of sensitive personal information aggregated by data brokers makes the sale of that data to our foreign adversaries a unique threat to national security and individual privacy,” Pallone said on Tuesday.

Countries like China could use that information “to launch sophisticated influence campaigns [and] conduct espionage”, he added.

Pallone’s legislation was introduced in conjunction with a bill that would force the Beijing-based owner of popular short-video platform TikTok to divest the app or face a ban from operating in the US.

Lawmakers are concerned that the Chinese government would compel TikTok to provide US user data for surveillance or influence campaigns.

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Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, the Democratic co-sponsor of that bill, which passed last week in the House, said the two bills complemented each other as limiting data brokers’ access “prevents our foreign adversaries from buying American data through other sources” if they cannot directly access data through TikTok.

Tuesday’s targeting of data brokers follows a White House executive order in February that similarly restricts the sale of Americans’ sensitive information to “countries of concern” – which is likely to include China and Russia.

It also follows several stalled attempts to enact national data privacy legislation.

Pallone on Tuesday said his bill represented the beginning of that process.

South China Morning Post