Monique Priestley is a State Representative for Vermont's Orange 2nd District.
There's a war going on over your family's personal data. But it's not a battle most people see or are aware of. That's because this battle is taking place behind closed doors in state legislatures across the country. As a Vermont senator and sponsor of one of the strongest data privacy bills in the country, I've been on the front lines of this war and have some insight into what it means to go up against big tech companies and their armies of lobbyists.
As Vermont and other states move to better protect consumer data, tech giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon have big stakes: every social media post, search query, and digital footprint (including those of children and teens) has a monetary value to these companies, generating huge profits. To prevent states from blocking this wealth of data, the tech giants have waged a relentless, low-key campaign to manipulate and confuse lawmakers.
These companies are sophisticated operations. As trillion-dollar companies that have faced intense criticism for their business practices, they know very well that they shouldn't be at the center of this influence campaign. So in Vermont and other states, they are rallying their trade associations into zones to push their case and ally with other, more established companies and organizations.
These tech groups are taking half-baked tactics. First, they try to kill a strong privacy bill by delaying or halting its passage. If that doesn't work, Plan B is to water it down by getting lawmakers to remove or weaken its core provisions. The goal is to create a hollow “privacy” bill that sounds good in the headlines but offers very little in terms of actual data protection.
The tech industry's involvement in these lobbying efforts can sometimes be confusing. In Vermont, a group called the Connected Commerce Council (C3), which works to “support small business,” spoke a lot about the privacy bill. The bill caught the attention of lawmakers who see small business owners as the backbone of the state's economy and a key constituency. But we later learned that C3 is funded by big tech companies and has previously overstated its membership numbers, with many small businesses saying they'd never heard of the group.
As out-of-state lobbyists and lawyers flocked to Vermont to try to “educate” us, we heard everything from warnings that our bill would “break the Internet” to threats that tech companies would stop doing business in the state if the bill passed. In the midst of this onslaught, my Vermont colleagues and I held hearings to compare stories of our fights with other lawmakers around the country who had tried to pass privacy bills.
The hearing was a stark reminder that we are not the first group of lawmakers to face the onslaught of Big Tech lobbying. “We rarely heard directly from Facebook, Google or Amazon,” said Maggie O’Neill, a Maine representative. Instead, she said, the companies leave lobbying to proxy groups like TechNet and the State Privacy & Security Coalition. O’Neill said she and her fellow lawmakers joked that by looking at the shoes of people in the committee room, “you can tell who’s from Washington and who’s from Maine.” The lobbyists’ shiny loafers stood out amid the drab footwear favored by Mainers.
“I've been in office for six years and I've never seen lobbying as hard as these guys are. They're putting a lot of money into lobbying,” Maryland Assemblywoman Sarah Love said, adding that once it became clear Maryland's privacy bill would pass, the tech industry began arguing that it would hurt small businesses and ran multiple ads against the bill, including at the Baltimore Orioles' opening day game.
Learning from the experiences of legislators in other states, we refined the language of our privacy bill, choosing to retain a critical provision: a “civil right of action” that would allow Vermont residents to sue tech companies for privacy violations. Throughout this process, we were fully aware that it could set a precedent for future state and national efforts to protect consumer data. The bill, which includes the important Vermont Kids Code to protect children online, is now before Vermont Governor Phil Scott, and industry groups including TechNet, NetChoice and the American Commerce Marketing Association are urging the Governor to veto the bill.
Tech companies want to continue enjoying the unregulated environment that enabled them to grow to monopoly size with little regard for user privacy. State legislators may not have the resources of the tech giants, but we have seen the real-life impacts of identity theft, fraud, and deepfake porn on our constituents, and we understand the need for strong privacy protections. Now we have a chance to make those protections a reality.
