Ohio: Don’t Give Big Tech a Pass On Privacy

Ohio lawmakers are giving big tech companies a gift in the form of the Ohio Personal Privacy Act. This law purports to strike a balance between consumer protection and company demands. Instead, it stacks the deck even further against individuals who want to protect their privacy.

The OPPA would enshrine privacy violating practices from Big Tech and other companies, and place the responsibility for managing privacy entirely on individuals—without actually improving protections for the people of Ohio or offering them a way to stand up for their own privacy. If it is not substantially improved before it is enacted, it risks locking in industry-friendly provisions that would directly benefit tech giants such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon. In many ways, passing this bill would be worse for the everyday consumer than passing nothing at all.

Take Action

Ohio: Tell Your Lawmakers to Stop the OPPA

For example, the bill purports to provide consumers with the option to opt-out of targeted advertising, one of the Big Tech practices that, unchecked, causes the most harm to privacy today. However, the language in the bill is ambiguous enough that large firms such as Facebook and Google might be able to continue business as usual—and maybe even entrench their hold on the advertising market.

It also offers any company a safe harbor from the law—meaning they are not subject to its requirements—if it can prove it complies with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) framework for privacy. NIST’s Privacy Framework advises companies on ways to categorize and maintain information, but is insufficient as a stand-in for a privacy law. In other words, this is yet another way that the OPPA sets up very limited protections and then gives companies a huge backdoor to route around them.

For these reasons, we believe that while the bill includes some language affording Ohioans new privacy rights, its loopholes and sweetheart deals would actually hurt privacy in Ohio more than it would help.