The American Privacy Rights Act (APRA) may have just suffered another of a thousand cuts before it is officially dead, at least in its current iteration.
This action follows a recently proposed draft of the bill that stripped out civil rights protections and requirements for algorithmic accountability, thus weakening some privacy protections, although it seems that there were additional sticking points regarding any private right of action.
The United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce Committee had scheduled a planned markup of the proposed bill with these changes for Thursday, June 27. But the planned markup was cancelled at the last minute, leaving the next steps towards even getting the proposed bill out of committee uncertain. This leaves the United States as one of the dwindling number of countries without a national privacy law, resulting in a patchwork of sectoral laws and state-by-state general privacy laws to fill in the void.
The U.S. House of Representatives is at a major crossroads with the proposed American Privacy Rights Act following a last-minute cancellation of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s scheduled markup of the bill 27 June.
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Energy and Commerce committee members and public observers were filing into the the committee room as a House Republican staff member entered five minutes before the scheduled start of the markup to announce the cancellation. U.S. Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Russ Fulcher, R-Idaho, learned of the cancellation as public observers did, with Fulcher marked by frustration and Eshoo by shock.
