84% Of Americans Want Tougher Online Privacy Laws, But Congress Is Too Corrupt To Follow Through

Americans are, apparently, tired of having every last shred of personal data over-collected, hyper monetized, then improperly secured by a rotating crop of ethics-optional corporations and lazy executives.

A new survey from U.S. News and World Report took a look at prevailing U.S. consumer privacy beliefs, and found, among other things, that 84% of the public wants Congress to pass tougher privacy laws:

“In our survey, 84% of respondents said the federal government should implement stricter data privacy laws, and just 16% said it should not. Congress has been deadlocked for years on this question, although a bipartisan effort appeared to be making some headway in 2024.”

As is the norm for U.S. journalism, the outlet frames our failure to pass an internet privacy law over the last 30 years as something that just kind of happened without meaningful cause. The “question” of whether to have even baseline public privacy protections has been left unanswered due to some sort of ambiguous externality. Just blame that pesky, ambiguous gridlock.

In reality, Congress hasn’t passed a privacy law because it’s blisteringly, grotesquely corrupt. U.S. policymakers have decided, time and time and time again, that making gobs of money is more important than consumer welfare, public safety, market health, or even national security (see: our obsession with TikTok, while ignoring the national security risks of unregulated data brokers).

The federal government is also disincentivized from passing a nationwide privacy law for the internet era because they’ve found that buying consumer data from data brokers is a wonderful way to avoid having to get a traditional warrant.

You could, on any random day, pluck any of a million mainstream news reports on consumer privacy from the newswire and not find a single one willing to make either of these causes clear to readers. Yes, getting everybody aligned on quality privacy legislation is difficult, but it’s not 30 straight years of inaction difficult. At some point, this reckless disregard for public welfare is a feature, not a bug.

All of that said, it’s evident that the public isn’t great when it comes to personal responsibility. Most of the users surveyed didn’t engage in basic protective measures like two-factor authentication or reliable, encrypted password managers:

“42% use multi-factor authentication, seen by experts as a good way to protect online accounts, and just over half (53%) use security questions to verify their identity. Only one in six (17%) said they use a password manager app or software that creates hard-to-break passwords, and 27% said they used biometric authentication such as facial recognition or fingerprint.”

In the absence of federal and state protection from reckless data monetization, consumers have to have their own backs, and it’s clear we’re not particularly good at that, either.