HARTFORD — A top priority of majority Democrats in the state Senate to protect the privacy of residents and children in the digital age won unanimous approval Thursday night and would allow the Department of Consumer Protection to issue fines of up to $25,000 for violations of online-dating rules and require ways for people to complain about harmful or unwanted behavior.
The bill, approved after 70 minutes of debate and which next moves to the state House of Representatives, would protect consumer health data, require dating apps to inform participants of common online scams, require websites and apps to “take reasonable care” to protect minors from privacy invasions and ban them from selling personal data or utilizing it to promote targeted advertising.
State Sen. James Maroney, D-Milford, co-chairman of the General Law Committee, said the legislation would build on a bill that became law last year, making Connecticut the fifth state in the country to adopt data privacy laws on health care and children. Reproductive data, gender-affirming care and mental health information would also be added to last year’s law.
“We’re making it opt-in consent for the sale or sharing of that data,” Maroney said during the floor debate. “We understand that that is intensely personal and private, and it should be protected.” The bill would also limit the access to consumer health data to organizations that submit to confidentiality requirements and would create digital secrecy zones around certain locations in a procedure called geofencing. “It also prevents the sale of consumer health data, and it prevents geofencing of both reproductive health care facilities and mental health facilities.”
The bill would give parents of minors up to the age of 16 the authority to delete social media accounts.
“We don’t want to allow potential grooming or adults reaching out to children that they don’t know,” Maroney said.
“If you offer online services to minors, you have to offer reasonable care to avoid heightened risk of harm,” Maroney said, stressing that it would ban the targeted advertising and sale of data up to the age of 18 without opt-in consent. “They can allow you to sell your data, but it’s your choice, not the companies’. You cannot use a feature designed to significantly increase a minor’s use of an online service. You can’t design a product to make it addictive, so the kids are stuck on their phone with auto replaying of videos and other features designed to get them to stay on the phone.”
“Today, we’re doing a lot of great work to protect all of our residents,” said Sen. Paul Cicarella of North Haven, a top Republican on the General Law Committee. “Every day, a lot of vulnerable information is transferred back and forth, just from our smartphone — financial, personal, medical — and people collect that information, and they repurpose it, sometimes for good, sometimes it could be used in negative ways. I think this bill addresses that. Our kids are constantly on these devices.”
State Sen. Tony Hwang, R-Fairfield, said that while social media has enabled people to stay in better communications with friends and family, others are becoming more isolated in an unreal world of expectations, bullying and privacy invasion.
“We’ve been able to cater content to allow people to enjoy what they want to watch, when they want to watch it and be able to kind of share your experience with many others in the world,” Hwang said. “That has created a much more connected society. The impact is profound. But there’s a dark side to all of this because we have seen research that just came out that those individuals that spend an inordinate amount of time engaging on social media are multiple times higher in susceptibility to depression, to mental health challenges. What we have also seen is an unrealistic portrait of imagery, of self-esteem considerations.”
Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, said it’s the role of government to step in at times like this when the still-emerging social media landscape is coming into sharper focus in some ways. He said that Connecticut’s privacy laws are being acknowledged as a national model.
“We have technology that is changing very rapidly, and government’s role is to put guardrails, at times, on these types of technologies,” Duff said of the children’s portion of the legislation. “I’m equally glad that we’re doing what we can to protect women’s rights and their health care as well. I think in the future, what we’ll see is we’ll see other states that have not adopted this type of legislation have problems. And yet in Connecticut, because we have, people may not understand or recognize the fact that the work we have done has prevented a lot of problems that have been out there.”
Sen. James Maroney, D-Milford, co-chairman of the legislative General Law Committee
Brian A. Pounds/Hearst Connecticut Media
