Data Privacy

Please donate to the show at https://secure.actblue.com/donate/impodcast

Big tech companies are hoovering up more and more of our own personal data than ever, whether to sell us products or to sell our data to others. At what point does our government step in and protect our right to privacy? Our state legislature is currently considering two versions of a Massachusetts Consumer Data Privacy Act to do just that. We're joined by Kade Crockford, the Director for Technology and Justice Programs at the ACLU of Massachusetts, to discuss what legislators have been working on, the differences between the two versions of the bills, and how it could help protect all of us in this digital age.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

To stay informed:

• Subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@theincorruptibles6939
• Subscribe to the podcast at https://incorruptible-mass.buzzsprout.com/
• Sign up to get updates at http://ww12.incorruptiblemass.org/podcast?usid=18&utid=30927978072
• Donate to the show at https://secure.actblue.com/donate/impodcast

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

00:00:02 - 00:00:18

Hello and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. Our mission here is to help us all transform state politics because we know that we could have a state legislature that truly represented the needs of the 7 million of us who live here. Today we are going to be talking about data privacy.

00:00:19 - 00:00:29

We have an amazing guest from the ACLU, and we will be talking about a new bill that the House and the Senate have been working on. We will talk about how those are different. We'll be talking about enforcement.

00:00:29 - 00:00:49

We'll be talking about the protections that are in those bills. We will be talking about the tech industry and what they're doing because they are not in favor of these bills. We will also be talking about the timing because we are running up on the very end of this 2-year session, the 2-year term, and so we'll talk a little bit about, you know, when it might get passed.

00:00:49 - 00:01:04

And of course, we'll talk about how you can get involved to help get progressive legislation passed. So before we do all of that, I will have my regular co-hosts introduce themselves. And today I will start with Jordan.

00:01:06 - 00:01:14

My name is Jordan Brooke Powers. They use he/him. I'm in Worcester, Massachusetts, and I have been a member of the ACLU for over 30 years since The American President came out.

00:01:14 - 00:01:20

And I was like, well, I have to join this organization. All right. And Jonathan.

00:01:20 - 00:01:32

Jonathan Cohen, he/him/his, joining from Boston in the South End. Been active in progressive issues and electoral campaigns for well over a decade now. Also a member of the ACLU.

00:01:33 - 00:01:56

And if you want a very quick, amusing ACLU story, is going to the— was it 2016 ACLU gala? Was when I realized I had left my dress shoes still in my parents' condo from several years prior because of how rarely I have to wear a suit. Ah, yes. And I am Anna Callahan.

00:01:56 - 00:02:11

I may not forget. Coming at you from Medford, where I am a city councilor and do a lot of local politics work. I think I first joined the ACLU after I got arrested in 2000 for protesting the rightward drift of the Democratic Party.

00:02:11 - 00:02:25

I was a little early, but prescient. So, and now I am really excited to have our guest on. It is Cade Crockford from ACLU Massachusetts.

00:02:25 - 00:02:32

And Cade, if you don't mind introducing yourself, that would just be amazing. Yeah, of course. My name's Kade.

00:02:32 - 00:02:48

I run the Technology and Justice Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, and I am coming at you from Dorchester, Massachusetts today. Excellent. I suspect people know a fair amount about the ACLU.

00:02:49 - 00:03:57

I think one thing that would really help our listeners is in case folks didn't hear the episode we did with you a couple of months ago, it would be great if you could just give us a little bit of a broad overview of what's happening in Massachusetts around data privacy before we dive into the House and Senate bills? Yeah, absolutely. So we, together with Progressive Mass and dozens of other organizations in Massachusetts representing groups of people, organized groups of people from labor to religious organizations to the statewide domestic violence, anti-domestic violence network, Jane Doe, to reproductive justice groups and many other types of organizations, Have been working to urge the legislature for about 4 years now to pass consumer privacy legislation. And we launched this campaign initially anticipating the Dobbs decision at the Supreme Court overturning Roe versus Wade, knowing that we in Massachusetts had done a tremendous amount of work collectively to strengthen and shore up our reproductive justice and gender-affirming healthcare.

00:03:57 - 00:04:38

Protections in state, but knowing that the big missing piece of that puzzle was the digital data that people are leaving behind them every day when we use our cell phones and use the internet. And so we partnered back then with this coalition and had a much narrower demand. We wanted to pass legislation to ban the sale of precise geolocation data from our cell phones Because believe it or not, there's a huge industry, a shadow industry of data brokers who buy cell phone location data that shows not just where we are in a given city, but the room that we are in, in a building.

00:04:39 - 00:05:08

It is that precise. This data comes from all sorts of different sources through apps on our phones that sell the data to data brokers, from sometimes even our telecommunications companies. Major companies like T-Mobile have been found in the past to have not only collected money from their customers every month for providing cell phone service, but then turned around and sold our most sensitive information to these third-party data brokers on the side.

00:05:09 - 00:05:23

The information comes also through the online advertising industry. So there are a lot of different sources for that data. But the point is, these data brokers, which are companies that most people have never heard of— I mean, these are companies called Gravy Analytics.

00:05:24 - 00:05:31

There are just a million of these companies out there. Who couldn't like gravy? Yeah, right. Actually, that one's based here in Massachusetts.

00:05:31 - 00:05:47

I think it's the only major location data broker that's based here. But these companies are buying all this data from a bunch of different sources, combining it, repackaging it, and then selling it to literally anyone with a credit card. So that includes the government.

00:05:47 - 00:06:13

That includes ICE, the Trump Department of Homeland Security, Kash Patel's FBI is buying this information in what we believe is a pretty obvious extraconstitutional runaround the Fourth Amendment. But regardless, they don't care about the law. This is what they're doing, right? So this is one piece of what became this session a much larger, larger comprehensive data privacy bill.

00:06:13 - 00:06:26

So we were thrilled that Senate Senate President Karen Spilka last year said, hey, I know you guys want to pass this location data bill. Good idea. But we should do more than that.

00:06:26 - 00:06:45

You know, looking at the broader scale of threats that are facing people in Massachusetts, it's not only our cell phone location data that's being bought and sold and traded. It is our biometric data. That's information that is unique to each of us, physical characteristics that are unique to each of us.

00:06:45 - 00:07:14

So our face, our voice, The shape of our ear, believe it or not, is a biometric. And companies are also collecting and buying and selling and trading all of that type of sensitive data, information about our healthcare. So a lot of people don't realize that when you go online and you make a search on whether it's Google or DuckDuckGo or, you know, any, any, um, search engine for like the symptoms of something that you're, you're dealing with, right? Like a sore throat.

00:07:14 - 00:08:00

Let's, let's use an example that's relevant to today. Sore throat wildfire smoke, right? If you do that on a website like Google or DuckDuckGo, which we all do, that information, even though it's health-related, is not protected by federal healthcare privacy law because federal health privacy law, HIPAA, only pertains to healthcare entities, and Google is not a healthcare company. So all of the information that you are like, you know, sharing with private companies about your health, whether it's through a period tracking app on your phone or through a search engine or visiting WebMD or something like that, none of that information has any privacy protection whatsoever.

00:08:00 - 00:08:24

So, you know, Karen Spilka, President Spilka, was right. You know, addressing cell phone location data is not enough. And so the Senate passed a much broader consumer data privacy bill, which really touches all of these different areas of our lives and the kinds of personal information that companies are collecting about us and then manipulating, you know, in ways that are really abusive.

00:08:24 - 00:08:38

Yeah, I have to say, I'm so— when we think about what's happening now, like AI is like the cutting edge that everyone keeps thinking about. But data privacy is like many years that we should have taken care of this. Many years ago.

00:08:38 - 00:08:46

We're so behind the times in terms of how fast technology is changing. So, you know, better late than never. I'm glad they're doing it.

00:08:46 - 00:09:01

But I will also say that, like, they're, you know, that was from years ago, which, you know, really should have been taken care of before all of this data got out. And, you know, we're beyond that now. Like, we need protection from, like, AI, which is— it's not even there.

00:09:01 - 00:09:33

But continuing on, Quick thing to chime in with. If people are interested in reading, if you're looking for fiction reading that feels very like prescient of its like near-term future, highly recommend the book Hum by Helen Phillips, which takes place in a, a not too distant future where like a lot of the planet is destroyed by climate change and everything is run by like these surveillance robots, like humanoid surveillance robots. Um, who are constantly trying to sell you things whenever they interact with you.

00:09:33 - 00:09:46

So, John, I'll just say I tried to read that book and it was too bleak. I could not even— I was like, like, I can't. I think about this stuff all day long, right? When I read fiction, the book was too real.

00:09:46 - 00:10:06

It was so— it was too real, too soon, but like too soon before and not too soon after. I know, too close, too close. Another good one though is Dave Eggers' The Circle, which is It's about a company that's kind of like a mix between Meta and Google and somebody who works there and basically realizes this is deeply wrong.

00:10:07 - 00:10:19

Yeah. But I think it's, for regular people who are just wondering, this stuff is being used. The Minneapolis police are using data collections, this collection service to track activists.

00:10:21 - 00:10:39

That activist tracking is coming, if it hasn't already, to a community near you. Certainly the police have used it without oversight. And so despite us worrying about the dystopian future, it's here, now, and present.

00:10:39 - 00:11:09

We saw not too long ago a small-town Texas sheriff's office use a combination of FLOC and this data available to track a woman getting a legal abortion in a different state and trying to prosecute her back in Texas. These things are happening right now as we speak. And so these are more, this is why it's so important we, like the legislature, step in with a bold, really effective approach to actually protecting our data.

00:11:09 - 00:12:04

And, you know, the other thing to think about is that the reason this is also really important is that while there's a lot of small apps on your phone that you probably don't think about that are also collecting this data, like it was recently Wired had an article about games, like some, like games that you play on your phone, that was actually just a front to collect all of this information that it could sell, that like the games were just a side hustle and that Google had, you know, given it permission to collect all this information and that that was actually its main business was selling your location, what you were doing, and the game was just a sort of gateway into that on your phone. And so regulating this and saying, actually, like you have to regulate this, corporations, and we can sue you, that means Google is actually gonna start paying attention to to its store, which it currently does not do. It does not care what the apps do to your phone.

00:12:04 - 00:12:16

It does not do any regulation. Apple, a little bit more, but basically not at all. This now enables us to hold them accountable, not wait for the state to get around to it 10 years after it's done something wrong in the hopes that it might get to it.

00:12:16 - 00:12:37

Like, it enables us to say, no, you are responsible for ensuring our safety on those devices. And they'll take a more proactive role because they'll be held liable if they don't. And so that's why it's really important that this is not a, it's a, It's— we can stop the dystopian future if we do stuff now to make sure that there's some protections in place.

00:12:38 - 00:12:56

And I'm thrilled that that is all happening, that we're having this at the state level. Absolutely necessary. I just want to throw in a little tiny thing about the local level, because in Medford, where we have a good, strong progressive majority on the city council, we did pass an ordinance that prevents our police force from buying this kind of data.

00:12:56 - 00:13:24

It prevents them from acquiring it in any way, whether it is because of their own body cameras or other FLOC or surveillance that they obtain without the permission of the city council, but it also prevents them from buying it or being given it by other agencies and/or companies. So you can also protect yourself at the local level, and I encourage people to do so and reach out to me if you have any questions about that. So let's get on to the House and Senate bills.

00:13:26 - 00:14:07

So yeah, you know, one of the things that was a guiding light for us in this process is the idea that contrary to what the tech bros in Silicon Valley will tell us, we can have the technologies that we want that are genuinely useful to us and our privacy, right? We have been sold this lie for 20 years now. That the only conceivable business model for the 21st century internet is surveillance capitalism. This idea that the product is free, right? The use of Google or whatever doesn't cost us, although that is increasingly changing.

00:14:07 - 00:14:38

You'll note if you have ever taken a look at your Gmail storage, you know, they're starting to really harass you about paying them every month. But broadly speaking, the business model has been You know, we collect every single bit of information about you and monetize that to the tune of trillions of dollars a year in profit for these companies. And in exchange, you get a Gmail app or you get, you know, an Instagram account where you can post your pictures and your friends can see them.

00:14:38 - 00:14:51

Right. But that's actually not the only way that the internet can work. And the law is a tremendously powerful force to shape markets and to shape things like the internet and smartphones, and we need to use it.

00:14:51 - 00:15:12

So, so the Senate bill has extremely strong protections towards that end. And basically what it does is it says, we're done with this like notice and consent model, right? Where you go online and there are like a million pop-ups and there you click the dropdown thing and there are 45 choices you can make. Forget about that.

00:15:13 - 00:15:34

This bill, the Senate's bill, which they passed last September in 2025, essentially says that like our food safety system, you know, when you go to the store to buy milk, like, you don't then take it home and bust out your chemistry kit to see if it has like poop in it. You just assume. And obviously this is maybe not the best example given what's going on with our government right now.

00:15:34 - 00:15:47

I'm about to say like, yeah, lettuce right now. But the system is supposed to work like that, John. That's supposed to work, right, is that we can just drink the milk that we buy in the store, eat the lettuce, not worry about dying of, you know, E.

00:15:47 - 00:16:09

coli or something like that. So that's how we want the privacy system to work too. We want the, the law to put the burden on the companies limiting how they can collect and process our personal information so that ordinary people don't have to become data privacy experts or read every you know, terms of service agreement or whatever.

00:16:09 - 00:16:29

They just have redline protections in the law that protect their privacy. So that's what the Senate did. And then just quickly on that, because whenever you have that like long list of do you accept, they're always designed to make people be like, I don't know what this is asking me, I don't care, I just want to get to the website.

00:16:29 - 00:16:48

And that's not a meaningful constraint. Totally. And that's true for all of us, but it's particularly true for people who are pressed for time, for people who have 3 jobs and don't have time to do all of that, for kids, for older people, for people who, you know, for whom English isn't their first language, or they're like, you know, English learners.

00:16:48 - 00:17:09

Like, it is particularly difficult for the, for the most vulnerable among us really to, to be dealing with that effectively. So we want standards in the law that put the companies at the, you know, that make the companies responsible for limiting the collection and processing of our information. And that is what the Senate bill does very effectively.

00:17:10 - 00:17:32

It also completely bans the sale of all of what the Senate calls sensitive data, which is hugely important. So that's things like not only precise geolocation data, which is where we started the campaign, but also our biometric data. Again, health information that companies like WebMD or your period tracker are collecting and other types of sensitive information.

00:17:32 - 00:17:47

So that's what the Senate bill did. Unfortunately, the Senate bill has an enforcement section that relies exclusively on the attorney general. The AG would be the only cop on the beat if the Senate bill became law.

00:17:48 - 00:18:05

So the House has a different, a totally different approach. The one thing that's consistent in these 2 bills is that they both totally ban the sale of precise geolocation data from our phones, which is a huge victory. But the House has a different sort of way of going about this.

00:18:06 - 00:18:31

You know, this question of whether the burden is on the companies to limit their collection and data processing or whether it's in part on us. And the House's proposal is more mixed. It's less rigid rules like the Senate, which we prefer, and allows for more sort of room to maneuver for the companies, allows for people to consent to the sale of their sensitive data.

00:18:31 - 00:18:45

With the exception of cell phone location data. And so those protections, in our view, are not as lock tight as sort of like strong and tight as the Senate's protections. However, the House nailed it on enforcement.

00:18:46 - 00:19:18

The House bill has a private right of action, which enables ordinary people, like you were saying, Jordan, like us, to get a lawyer and sue a company like Meta If it violates the law and, you know, illegally sells our data or illegally collects our information. And that's extremely important because these companies are, I guarantee you, going to ignore the law if the Attorney General is the only cop on the beat. And that's for the simple reason that they're businesses.

00:19:18 - 00:19:49

They're going to make a calculated zeros and ones business decision. They're going to look at how much money they will make by violating the law and continuing to collect and process and manipulate and abuse our data. And if that number is up here and the number that they might pay in a fine to the AG every 10 or 20 years, which let's be honest is maybe even a stretch because the AG has— even though her office is great, we love Andrea Campbell, she's amazing— she has like 2 privacy lawyers maybe in her office.

00:19:50 - 00:20:17

Meta has hundreds of lawyers on their staff, and that's just one company, right? So a company like that is going to view a privacy law with no private right of action as a suggestion, not really a law that they have to follow in order to protect their bottom line. And that's why we need the House enforcement language. It's so critical because it would be a real shame after all if we all went through all of this work for 4 years Right.

00:20:17 - 00:20:34

And the legislature did all of this work meeting with so many stakeholders, you know, in both the House and the Senate, deliberating over amendments, passing these bills only for what? For nothing to happen, for us to have rights on paper but not in reality. That's not good enough. We need a private right of action.

00:20:34 - 00:21:02

And, and the last thing I'll say about that is that that's actually consistent with our state consumer protection law. So Our state consumer protection law, which is Chapter 93A, that's the law that basically protects you if you go to like a car dealership, right, and you buy a new car and the car dealer lies to you and says this is a brand new car, it has no miles on it, and it turns out it's got 50,000 miles on it and it's a piece of shit. Excuse me.

00:21:03 - 00:21:23

They— you can— you, you do not have to go to the Attorney General. You can hire a lawyer and sue that scammy car dealership and get your money back and get damages. Because the legislature knew when they passed the consumer protection law that companies were going to ignore the law if consumers couldn't enforce their own rights in court.

00:21:24 - 00:21:41

And so this is basically just a consumer data protection law. There's no reason why we should have a weaker standard than the existing standard in the law that already protects us from scammy corporations and businesses. We should have the same sort of enforcement regime.

00:21:42 - 00:21:55

And that's, you know, close. The House got a lot closer to doing that. And so I'll just sum this up by saying what we really hope to see is the Senate's protections with the House's enforcement.

00:21:56 - 00:22:17

That would be the ideal bill to protect people in Massachusetts. Great. And I really do love that kind of emphasis on how both of those are critical parts of an ultimate bill, because I feel like we do often, like in a lot of policy advocacy, the question of how the bill actually gets enforced can fall out of the discussion that you need.

00:22:18 - 00:22:54

You need the strongest possible content and you need a clear way to make sure that the law will actually exist. Because as you noted with, let's say, the small staffing on privacy issues at the AG's office, Big tech companies know that they can make the cost of the AG's office suing them so big that it would deter them from taking up a case in the first place. Whereas if you were able to get a private attorney to sue, that, that could be like somebody who might maybe specializes in that and is willing, like willing to take on that, take on, has a different assessment of risk and reward in taking on cases, makes it so that you actually can enforce it.

00:22:55 - 00:23:07

I just want to give— oh, go ahead. I was just going to say, and that's why Meta has one goal in the legislative process, and it's to ensure that there's no private right of action. That's it.

00:23:07 - 00:23:15

Because they know. I just want to give a, I'll give a world example for, from our household. We, so you have a right.

00:23:16 - 00:23:28

Massachusetts has a really good law around your cars. If you own more of the car than the company that you're loaning from, they can't take your car. They have to work out a way to get payment for it, but you own the majority of that car.

00:23:28 - 00:23:43

So you have a— so there's a good consumer protection. On top of that, tow truck companies can't go onto private property to take a car. Private tow truck companies regularly go onto private companies, private things to take cars.

00:23:43 - 00:23:53

And I— so that happened to my wife and I. And we owned— we had one payment left. And it was when she was not as economically doing as well.

00:23:53 - 00:24:07

And so they took her car and I went down to the police station. With the law in black and white, like literally a copy of the Mass General law, they would refuse to enforce it. And if it was up to the AG, it could take years for any of that to sort of get, to get cleared out.

00:24:08 - 00:24:19

But we were able to go to a lawyer and say like, hey, we think that this is a clear violation of the law. I am, I'm meticulous about paperwork. So I had all of the paperwork proving it was a thing.

00:24:19 - 00:24:45

And they were able to join other— what they found was that Santander was doing this to poor people across the state of Massachusetts, was waiting until 1 or 2 payments left and then stealing cars. And they were basically like, even if the state sues us, it's going to be pennies. But because we had a private right to action through a class action, we, you know, people in Massachusetts were able to get back over $300 million from Santander.

00:24:46 - 00:24:59

But that's only because of the private right to action. Like, that is an important piece to that because it's not just you privately. What it means is That goes through a system whereby people can join into class actions.

00:24:59 - 00:25:10

Those class actions then have lawyers' fees that can really make the costs go up more. Whereas the attorney general with 1 or 2 staff members is going to look to settle it. They're going to look to have a little bit of money.

00:25:10 - 00:25:24

That money is going to go back into the coffers. So they're incentivized to actually settle because they just want some money back into the thing and a good press release. So 7, you know, if it was up to the private right, it would've been 7 years down the road.

00:25:24 - 00:25:29

No, like our car, the car would have been gone. We would have never heard. No one would have been held accountable.

00:25:29 - 00:25:47

And not because they don't want to do the right thing, because that's the process when the state sues. But the private right that moved relatively quickly, and within 3 years they had to settle in such a way that every person that they had harmed had to get restitution, even people who hadn't, like, you know, signed up to begin with. Yeah, exactly.

00:25:47 - 00:26:03

So that's what happens. Good for you, Jordan. And not only does that example show that, you know, the, the people who were harmed got justice, which is critical, but it also is a major warning to other companies.

00:26:03 - 00:26:45

Like, you better not fuck with Massachusetts consumers because we have good consumer protection laws and there are plaintiff-side attorneys who are financially motivated to find out and to sue you blind. You know what I mean? Like, right, that right deterrence is incredibly important. That is what actually protects the majority of consumers from those predatory things happening in the future, right? So yeah, I mean, look, Andrea Campbell supports the private right of action in this privacy bill because she agrees that her office cannot do this alone, right? And that if they are the only cop on the beat, people are not going to see the privacy protections that we deserve and that the law requires.

00:26:47 - 00:27:06

Well, let's move on to talking about the timing of this session. So July 31st is in some ways kind of the end of the session and they take August off and then who knows what they do in the fall, you know. But tell us a little bit about these 2 bills and like what stages they're at and what do you think is going to happen between now and the end of the year? Yeah.

00:27:06 - 00:27:16

So the Senate bill passed in September of 2025. The House bill passed in June of this year. Um, subsequently they formed what's called the conference committee.

00:27:16 - 00:27:35

So those of you who follow Massachusetts politics know that this is the process for reconciliation in Massachusetts. They appoint, uh, 3 people from the House and 3 people from the Senate, and they meet and negotiate a final package to agree to that gets approved by both chambers. And that's the bill that goes to the governor.

00:27:36 - 00:28:02

So we suspect We are very confident, in fact, that this conference committee process is not going to wrap up by July 31st. Lawmakers are focused on getting bills passed this session. They changed the rules so that unlike in previous sessions, conference committees, bills that have already passed both chambers but just have to be reconciled, do not have to be finished by July 31st.

00:28:02 - 00:28:27

So that process can go on for the rest of the calendar year. So we are— we strongly suspect that what's going to happen is they're going to rush through the next 2 weeks trying to get other bills passed, trying to get other stuff over the finish line, which frankly is good because there's a lot of stuff that, you know, we as Massachusetts residents need to see them do. And then after the 31st, many of them will go on vacation.

00:28:27 - 00:28:31

Many of them will be campaigning. There's primaries on September 1st. Right.

00:28:32 - 00:28:48

So many of them will be campaigning or off for the month of August, or at least for a lot of that period. And then I suspect that after Labor Day, they're going to start working again. And that's when really we're going to start to see a rush of corporate lobbyists, you know, hitting the statehouse again, hitting the conference committee.

00:28:49 - 00:29:06

And so that's really when we— over the next 10 days or so, and then starting again in September is when we need folks to be calling their members. And just to be clear on this, you know, sometimes people in the legislature will tell you, oh, I'm not on the conference committee, so don't talk to me about that. No, no, no, no, no.

00:29:08 - 00:29:33

Your member, even if they're not on the conference committee, represents you. And you ought to ask your member to go to leadership and say, it is important to me and my constituents that the final bill includes strong protections and have a private right of action. So that's the ask that you should be making of your state senator and your state rep over the next couple of weeks.

00:29:34 - 00:29:43

And throughout the rest of the summer and into the fall. It doesn't matter if they're not on the conference committee. They represent you and they need to make it known to leadership that this matters to you.

00:29:44 - 00:29:47

As well, I feel like there's a simple reality. They all talk to each other in that building. Totally.

00:29:48 - 00:30:08

Like the idea that like, oh no, I'm not on the committee, so I have no involvement in that process. It's like, you're not telling me that you're not interacting with anybody on that, like beyond just House and Senate leadership. Most of them are talking to at least one member of that conference committee at some point over time and can be saying like, hey, I hope you guys do X, Y, and Z on that conference committee.

00:30:08 - 00:30:13

It matters a lot to me. Totally. And to leadership, right? I mean, yeah, you know, you're there.

00:30:13 - 00:30:36

They're talking to folks in leadership on the House and Senate depending on who they are. And there are caucus meetings, you know, there are leadership meetings. There are all sorts of opportunities for your member in the House and Senate to make it known to the powers that be that, you know, these are important issues and that, frankly, You know, I can't, I can't go back to my district and tell people we didn't pass a bill with a private right of action.

00:30:36 - 00:30:52

Right. That's the sort of thing that we need to generate. That's the level of, you know, contact that we need to generate because the tech industry, I can promise you, is running a full-court press right now, pressuring lawmakers to pass a weak bill with no real enforcement.

00:30:53 - 00:30:59

And we have to outorganize them. Yeah. And I think it's really— it's— I just want to stress this point.

00:30:59 - 00:31:26

Like, the House did the right thing on this. That is not often And so that's a really, you know, it's not often where in this scenario you can be calling your state representatives and say, back up leadership in your place to keep the thing that you all did. So this is a real opportunity to get the good things in there because the place where we often struggle to get the good things actually did the really brave, good thing.

00:31:26 - 00:31:37

And they should, and they have to go back. They have to go, a lot of them, you know, if there is a primary challenge that they're worried about, it is often in the House. This is a place for them to really strengthen that.

00:31:37 - 00:31:48

And so you who are listening, you really can make a difference here by leveraging the fact that the House did the right thing. Call your statehouse, call your state senator and say, this is important to me. I care about this.

00:31:48 - 00:32:03

It's important that you, that you keep this part in and put pressure on the Senate as well. So this is a place where your phone call really is going to make a difference. And the reason that it might seem like obvious, but the thing that happens is Massachusetts is actually different from other states.

00:32:04 - 00:32:28

A lot of these corporations, Facebook has a huge Google has a huge presence in Massachusetts. They leverage all of those jobs. The fact that the Massachusetts legislature thinks of itself as protecting the sort of burgeoning industries, those are leverage points for the tech industry that I promise you, as Keej just said, is being leveraged to try to weaken this.

00:32:29 - 00:32:38

You also have leverage in this moment in a way that we often don't. So it's really important that you step in and make that phone call or have that conversation. It's a really simple thing to do.

00:32:38 - 00:32:45

It's a simple request, and it's just a second to say, thank you for the data privacy bill. We need the private right to action. Make sure that gets in.

00:32:46 - 00:32:50

Please have a conversation. I'm not on the conference committee, but you know who they are. You'll probably meet them in the lunch thing.

00:32:51 - 00:33:18

Please just say that that's important. It's— I'm hearing about it from my constituents. And I just wanted to underscore that one thing that we've especially been seeing with how a lot of the big tech companies have been operating is that they're doing astroturfing where they want every, like, like mom-and-pop small, like, store on, like, on Main Street to say, oh, this is terrible for us, even though for the most part it doesn't even affect them, but that they know that they themselves are not publicly sympathetic actors.

00:33:19 - 00:33:35

That's exactly right. Meta, Google, they know that if they say, oh no, please don't do this to us, people are going to be like, really? Devil says what? You know what I mean? And so they are getting small businesses. They have a whole playbook that they've orchestrated all over the country.

00:33:36 - 00:33:50

And they're doing it here. They get small— they whip up a bunch of hysteria by lying to small businesses and giving them misinformation about what the bill would actually do to them. And then these small business owners are like, oh my God, we're not going to be able to advertise.

00:33:50 - 00:33:56

We're not going to be able to reach consumers. And so they do, you know, big tech's dirty work for them. It's all based on lies.

00:33:56 - 00:34:13

None of it's true. And crucially, the private right of action in the House bill would only apply to the biggest companies in the world. It would only apply to companies that collect personal data of 2 million or more Massachusetts consumers.

00:34:13 - 00:34:27

So, wow, we're not even talking about some big companies, right? We're really just talking about the biggest of the big companies. Um, so if you hear from someone like, oh, I'm concerned about that because it would harm small businesses, it wouldn't. It has nothing to do with small businesses.

00:34:27 - 00:34:43

It's really about going after the worst of the worst, these major tech companies that are busy destabilizing our democracy, cozying up with Donald Trump and the fascists. We can't stand for it, honestly. We need to out-organize these people.

00:34:43 - 00:34:57

100%. I am going to, on that note, mention that if you want to out-organize the other side, please donate to the show. We always forget to do this, but we're going to fit and squeak it in right before the end.

00:34:57 - 00:35:08

There should be a link below. You won't hear this kind of information about strategy and about, you know, how you can take action and really affect things in our state. You won't hear it anywhere else.

00:35:08 - 00:35:26

So donate to the show, whether it's $5 or $500. We love you all, every single person who donates. And on that note, I am going to ask everybody to give just a final word on this whole data privacy moment that we are in, which I think is a really positive one.

00:35:27 - 00:35:40

Who wants— okay, you're gonna go last. I'll just say really quickly, please do something. This is a really great opportunity for us to do something really important and really good so that we can avoid the dystopian future.

00:35:40 - 00:35:48

So please take this moment to step in. If you're listening to this, pause it for a second, make a quick phone call, leave a message. That's actually a great way to do it.

00:35:48 - 00:35:54

If you're worried about talking to someone, leave a message on their voicemail. They'll hear it. It'll mean something to them.

00:35:55 - 00:36:19

Yeah. No, I feel like what a good point because I feel like people can often be like, oh, but what if somebody picks up when I call? And it's like, just call after— call in the evening, call Saturday or Sunday. As long as like calling any day and any time is still useful, especially because what I would like to stress to people is that the people who don't want good things to happen are definitely contacting legislators all of the time.

00:36:20 - 00:36:35

And so if you affirmatively want good things to happen, you also need to be emailing and calling and meeting with legislators. If they already agree with you, that empowers them to do more. It strengthens conviction.

00:36:37 - 00:36:53

It makes them feel like that they're actually backed up by something. If they're kind of soft, it can move them to be stronger. If they're not actually that with you, it means that they might think more Maybe I need to shut up if my constituents feel so passionate about this.

00:36:55 - 00:36:58

Totally. Totally. I would only add— oh, sorry, sorry, go ahead.

00:36:58 - 00:37:12

I will just say that, yeah, this is a great opportunity. If you are one of those people who doesn't take action, and I know there's lots of folks out there, I used to be one of those people. I didn't do a lot.

00:37:12 - 00:37:21

I was not really engaged in politics. But this is like a super easy ask. Wait until evening, wait until the weekend, make a phone call, take you like 1 minute.

00:37:22 - 00:37:42

And it's a nice way to dip your toe in. And thinking about the place that we're at politically right now, where this kind of information is being used for absolutely awful purposes at the national level, that this is really a great way for you to feel good about yourself. You're going to go to bed that night, you're like, I did something great.

00:37:43 - 00:38:08

So, um, and on— and for our last, last word, I will pass it on to Kate. Yeah, totally. I mean, I'll just say this: there is— there are all sorts of civilizationally defining things happening right now, right? Like, we keep saying to ourselves, well, I guess this is what it like, like feels like to live through history, right? And it sucks in a lot of ways.

00:38:09 - 00:38:46

And it's overwhelming. But there are moments like this one where there are things that each of us can do that are not super time-consuming or difficult, where we can really, if we all do them, push just enough to push something over the edge to start to make dominoes fall in the right direction. And this is one of those moments on this bill because what we're doing here in Massachusetts is not just about our own rights, right? It's also about a broader fight that's happening at the federal level, that's happening in Congress.

00:38:46 - 00:39:17

And, you know, if, if, if we see a Congress in the coming years that wants to do data privacy legislation, they are going to look to what the states have done, right? And the tech industry is going to say, oh, look, even Massachusetts, you know, if, if they succeed in getting a shitty bill passed here, they're gonna say, oh look, even, you know, bright blue Massachusetts, they passed a bill that does blah blah blah, all these things that they want. So what we're doing here is not only important for us, it's important for the whole country. It's important for our children and theirs.

00:39:17 - 00:39:38

And so really just making one phone call— look, we have gotten so far in this movement on this campaign because people picked up the phone. We have heard so many times from so many elected officials, they've heard more about data privacy this session than almost anything else. And that is crazy because we are living through a fascist takeover of the United States government.

00:39:38 - 00:39:48

ICE is everywhere harassing people, smashing windows, taking out of them— taking them out of their cars. Our housing is insane. Climate's collapsing outside our window and people are calling about data privacy.

00:39:49 - 00:40:00

That is why we have a strong bill that passed the Senate. That is why we have a private right of action that passed the House. So this is really like— we're like 5 yards from the end line.

00:40:00 - 00:40:12

We cannot stop right now. We have to go harder and faster than we have for the first 95 yards because this is it right here, right where we can really make a difference. So please do pick up the phone.

00:40:12 - 00:40:21

Please call, email if you don't feel like calling. Those matter too. Just whatever you do, make sure that you are telling your elected representatives, state senator and state rep.

00:40:22 - 00:40:41

You want to see a strong privacy bill come out of conference that has a private right of action so that you as a consumer can sue these companies if they violate your rights. That is the standard in our state consumer protection bill, and it has to be the standard in our consumer data privacy bill as well. Amazing.

00:40:42 - 00:40:55

We are so glad to have you here and for all the work that you do. Um, thanks to you, thanks to my co-host, thanks to all of our listeners, um, and we look forward to seeing you all next week.