As we expected, consumer data privacy bills have been introduced in several states, including New York, Indiana, Oregon, and others. More could follow. Some states are also focusing specifically on data privacy for children and in the healthcare sector. Bloomberg Law offers a deep dive on state bills here.
We’ll be watching for progress on this issue at the state level—and are hopeful that Congress may consider a comprehensive consumer data privacy bill this year as well. We’ll highlight the best opportunities to engage when they arise.
Below is this week’s tech policy news and a featured commentary. Thank you for reading.
This Week in Washington
- New York Times: The Supreme Court is expected to consider taking up two cases that would challenge laws passed in Texas and Florida that prevent social media platforms from removing political content, adding to the court’s growing list of hearings that could challenge the way online speech is regulated.
- Nextgov: During an event hosted by the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy, Alan Davidson—the assistant secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information and the NTIA administrator—said that the agency was announcing a request for comment “on how we can increase our vigilance at the intersection of privacy and civil rights.”
- Roll Call: President Joe Biden and Republican lawmakers last week launched yet another effort to confront thorny issues relating to Big Tech and social media platforms that have bedeviled previous administrations and Congress, but the path to progress this time around is just as murky.
- CNBC: The Federal Aviation Administration said Thursday that a contractor unintentionally deleted files before an outage of a pilot-alert system that delayed thousands of flights last week.
Article Summary
- Community College Daily: The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) has announced the second cohort of 14 community colleges that will join a national effort by Microsoft and AACC to help two-year colleges create and expand cybersecurity programs.
- CyberScoop: After a year of stalled efforts in Congress to pass expanded children’s privacy legislation, states are plowing ahead with their own efforts to address growing concerns about how tech companies collect and use children’s data.
- POLITICO: Ukraine’s top cybersecurity leader is calling for the establishment of a single global organization to help share threat information and prepare for future attacks as Russia pounds Ukraine’s infrastructure and seeks to inflict maximum chaos on the ground.
- Axios: ChatGPT, the generative AI juggernaut, is getting a lot smarter when it comes to health care. A lot of clinical diagnoses and decisions could someday be made by machines, rather than by human doctors.
- Washington Post: The University of Texas at Austin, a sprawling campus with more than 52,000 students, said it has blocked the social media app TikTok from its networks and is in the process of removing the app from university-issued devices because of digital security concerns.
- Business Insider: The critical importance of semiconductors and the delicate manufacturing process have combined to turn these chips into the main battleground in a new race between the US and China for the future of technology.
- Axios: Criminal gangs are using a new method to guarantee a ransomware payout: They’re ditching the part where they lock up a target firm’s systems by encrypting them and are skipping straight to holding the company’s precious data for ransom.
- CBS News: Google is laying off 12,000 workers, becoming the latest technology company to trim staff after rapid expansions during the COVID-19 pandemic have worn off.
- The Verge: Microsoft is rolling out its Azure OpenAI service this week, allowing businesses to integrate tools like DALL-E and ChatGPT into their own cloud apps.
Featured Commentary
Official Microsoft Blog
- Earlier this week, Microsoft announced a reduction of the company’s overall workforce by 10,000 jobs through the end of March. CEO Satya Nadella sent a companywide communication, which discusses the economic context of this announcement and shares three priorities for the company as it pursues long-term opportunities. (Focusing on our short- and long-term opportunity – January 18, 2023)