[T]he Vermont Senate gave preliminary approval Monday to a bill that would regulate telemarketers and study whether to regulate data brokers and internet service providers.
The Senate approved S.72 in a voice vote. The bill could be passed as early as Tuesday, and the House would need to decide whether to accept changes or call for a conference committee.
Early in the session, S.72 was a bill that required telemarketers to disclose their identities through caller ID. The House Commerce and Economic Development Committee expanded S.72 into a vehicle to regulate data brokers.
Data brokers are firms that collect data, analyze it and sell it to third parties. The attorney general’s office testified that there are legitimate data brokers operating in Vermont but others could be selling personal information to criminals.
The House scaled back regulation of data brokers into language that will create a working group on whether and how to regulate them. That report from the Department of Financial Regulation and the attorney general’s office is due by Dec. 15.
The Senate Finance Committee had been considering a bill that would have required the Vermont Department of Public Service to reinstate internet privacy rules that President Donald Trump signed a law to overturn in April.
Critics of the measure Trump signed said it would have allowed internet service providers to sell personal information, including browser histories, to third parties. A data broker is an example of a third party that might want to buy a person’s browser history.
The Senate Finance Committee’s original privacy bill would have forced internet service providers to ask their customers’ permission before selling their personal information, such as their search history, to third parties.
Instead of attaching the language in that bill to this year’s telecommunications bill, H.347, the committee voted to study the issue and decide in the future whether to implement a new state-level regulation.
“If you remember, there was a great deal of concern when Congress canceled the data privacy rules, and I got a lot of emails,” Sen. Ann Cummings, D-Washington, told senators before Monday’s vote. “People thought that their personal information was now going to be sold.”
The committee learned that the FCC privacy rule that Trump and Congress overturned was not scheduled to go into effect until the end of 2017. Cummings pointed to that as one of many issues that would make it hard for the state to regulate internet service providers.
Cummings said there is also “some little kind of a turf war going on between the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission,” and the attorney general is concerned about federal pre-emption.
