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The Digital Protection Act of 2021 has just been announced. The mission is to establish a federal agency, Data Protection Agency (DPA), that will add protections to the United States public against unscrupulous data practices. Currently the United States is one of the few developed Democratic Nations that does not have an agency of this kind.
The original proposal was released in 2020 and has gone through an overhaul over the last few months. Some specific areas that have been made more robust include harm from privacy breaches, discrimination, high-risk industry practices, and effects of large-scale data collection. The new agency would also have the mandate of enforcing existing and new laws pertaining to data protection.
One of the sponsors of the bill, Senator Gillibrand stated, “It’s critical that we modernize the way we handle technology, which is why I first introduced the Data Protection Act last year, in order to create an executive agency whose sole job is to protect data and privacy”.
The last decade has many examples of social manipulation through the mass data campaigns. One of the most infamous is the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The company tied to one of the largest data collection schemes performed through the Facebook platform. Cambridge Analytica was a self-proclaimed behavior modification company through social media influence and psychological tactics used in the early years of the Afghanistan War. They used these skills to influence elections and push false narratives. One of the most popular votes they were involved in was the Brexit campaign in the U.K. as well as the Ted Cruz campaign in the United States.
The United States is long overdue for some regulatory interventions in the way large data is collected on its citizens.
