Sec. 2. Findings

1,316 words·~6 min read·/bill/116/s/2398/is/section-2

A research copy — for the controlling text, always check the official state or federal source. Not legal advice.

Congress makes the following findings: According to the Pew Research Center, 90 percent of Americans reported using the internet in 2019, which was an increase from 52 percent in 2000. Internet service providers, browsers, websites, search engines, email providers, device manufacturers, and certain social media companies collect unique data on nearly every American’s online and increasingly offline activities, every day. One United States based search engine advertises its ability to track hundreds of categories of data about specific individuals including age, gender, occupation, income level, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, medical conditions such as AIDs, erectile dysfunction, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, and sexually transmitted diseases, family information such as number of children, children with special needs, infertility, and substance misuse, and support for social issues such as reproductive rights, unions and labor issues, and support for gun rights.

Targeting services, such as certain large search engines and social media platforms, maintain sophisticated data profiles on nearly every American. These targeting services are used by third parties to target and deliver communications to specific individuals based on their sensitive personal information, even if a third party does not control any individual’s personal information. In testimony before the Committee on the Judiciary of the Senate titled, Understanding Digital Advertising Ecosystem and the Impact on Data Privacy , the Committee received the following testimony regarding behavioral advertising: almost every single time you visit a website: data about you is broadcast to tens or hundreds of companies, which lets advertisers compete for the opportunity to show you an ad.

Advertising is necessary, and this sounds OK. But wait until you hear what information about you is in that big broadcast: it can include your – inferred sexual orientation, political views, whether you are Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, etc., whether you have AIDs, erectile dysfunction, or bi-polar disorder. It includes what you are reading, watching, and listening to. It includes your location, sometimes right up to your exact GPS coordinates. And it includes unique ID codes that are as specific to you as is your social security number, so that all of this data can be tied to you over time.

This allows companies you have never heard of to maintain intimate profiles on you, and on everyone you have ever known. . Online surveillance techniques are becoming more sophisticated. According to the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, new website tracking software can provide real-time surveillance of an individual’s online activity: Unlike typical analytics services, that provide aggregate statistics, these scripts are intended for recording and playback of individual browsing sessions, as if someone is looking over your shoulder. .

The volume of data now publicly available and attributable to a specific individual permits researchers to infer private information about that individual that the individual never disclosed publicly. According to a study from researchers at Cambridge University and Microsoft Research, an individual’s social media posts, pictures, and profile information can be combined to reliably infer that individual’s latent personality traits, including openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Prior to internet-based data tracking, the only way to obtain that type of sensitive psychological data would have been for an individual to elect to respond to a detailed personality questionnaire. According to a study published by the National Academy of Sciences, computers can predict an individual’s latent personality traits better than humans. Specifically, researchers found that a computer needed only 10 social media impressions to better predict an individual’s responses to a personality questionnaire than a coworker, 70 for a cohabitant or friend, 150 for a family member, and 300 for a spouse.

Communications tailored to an individual’s unique personality traits are designed to manipulate cognitive function rather than to persuade via appeals to rational decision making. A forthcoming publication by Julie E. Cohen titled Between Truth and Power describes the phenomenon as follows The operation of the digital information environment has begun to mimic the operation of the collection of brain structures that mid-twentieth-century neurologists christened the limbic system and that play vital roles in a number of precognitive functions, including emotion, motivation, and habit-formation, and observed that today’s networked information flows are optimized to produce what social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff calls instrumentarian power:

They employ a radical behaviorist approach to human psychology to mobilize and reinforce patterns of motivation, cognition, and behavior that operate on automatic, near-instinctual levels and that may be manipulated instrumentally . According to numerous studies, messages tailored to an individual’s unique personality traits are materially more effective at altering an individual’s behavior. A recent study published in the National Academy of Sciences found that it is possible to conduct psychological manipulation efforts online that are targeted and customized to each individual’s unique personality traits on a national scale.

Candidates, campaigns, and political organizations are increasingly using online data to infer personality traits and other psychological characteristics regarding specific United States persons, using that nonpublic information to target psychologically manipulative communications and using algorithms and other automated processes to automatically refine communications over time to improve their effectiveness. According to a study titled Voter Privacy in the Age of Big Data , political entities assemble a vast array of [personally identifiable information] into detailed dossiers on practically every American voter in order to target voters with individualized messages … Most voters are ignorant of the steps taken to create these dossiers and know even less about related targeting practices. .

The study further found that Political databases hold records on almost 200 million eligible American voters. Each records contains hundreds if not thousands of fields derived from voter rolls, donor and response data, campaign web data, and consumer and other data obtained from data brokers, all of which is combined into a giant assemblage … Ubiquitous personal identifiers (name, address, telephone numbers, email addresses, IP addresses, cookies, mobile devices IDs, and other unique IDs) allow campaigns to link and integrate these diverse data sets, while data mining and sophisticated statistical techniques allow them to engage in highly strategic and cost-effective analysis and targeting, and that Campaign insiders and paid consultants who not only view voter microtargeting as highly effective but also have assigned it a crucial role in determining the outcome of the past three presidential campaigns. .

The political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica reportedly used a database of 220,000,000 Americans, including thousands of unique data points on each individual and inferred personality trait analysis, to conduct psychological operations changing people’s minds not through persuasion but through . Cambridge Analytica reportedly worked in 44 United States elections in 2014 and another 50 in 2016, including on behalf of 2 major Presidential campaigns. informational dominance , a set of techniques that includes rumor, disinformation and fake news In Sorrell v.

IMS Health Inc., the Supreme Court invalidated a Vermont State law regarding restrictions on the use of personal information as violating the First Amendment. The court held that the government’s prohibition disfavor[ed] … speech with a particular content, namely marketing, and disfavor[ed] specific speakers, namely pharmaceutical manufacturers because it interfered with the manufacturers’ attempts to persuade recipients to use their products. Psychological targeting techniques seek to manipulate, not to persuade.

In Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court invalidated the Federal Election Campaign Act’s prohibition on corporate independent expenditures on the grounds that the First Amendment does not allow political speech restrictions based on a speaker’s corporate identity . Allowing individuals to control the use of their own personal information in the context of an election does not restrict the political speech of any person based on their identity. In Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court invalidated the Federal Election Campaign Act’s expenditure limitations, finding that they impose direct and substantial restraints on the quantity of political speech .

Allowing individuals to control the use of their own personal information in the context of an election does not limit the any person’s quantity of political speech.