3

Civil rights groups and some big tech companies also agree on the need for a more sweeping national data privacy law, akin to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation that came into force four years ago. “A comprehensive data privacy act would go a long way to protecting the lives of users and ensuring non-consensual tracking is a thing of the past,” says Bill Budington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

No such federal legislation is likely to emerge quickly, if at all. But even state privacy laws, as adopted in California, can raise the national bar. It has now become more expensive for tech companies to write separate code to carve out non-compliant states. Making it harder to do bad things can sometimes count as a good thing.