We Mainers take our privacy very seriously.
This value was well illustrated by a joke that went around during the pandemic: “Six feet apart? Sounds awful close to me!”
That’s why it’s no surprise that Maine passed, in 2019, one of the strongest laws in the nation to protect our privacy online.
The things you do on the internet can paint a picture of who you are: which medical offices you visit, what your politics are, what your religious beliefs are, or what your hobbies may be – using each keystroke, companies can paint a surprisingly accurate picture of your private life.
A bipartisan coalition of Maine legislators, with the support of our organizations and Maine-based internet providers, took action to regulate these practices after years of failure by Congress to act nationwide. Maine’s groundbreaking law required internet service providers to get your consent before they share or sell information about your internet use.
Online services, like Facebook, Instagram, Google and Twitter are not covered by the law. So while your data isn’t at risk from the company that brings the internet into your home, everything you do online is still vulnerable to being mined and sold off.
Charter Communications, branded as Spectrum in Maine and by far Maine’s biggest provider, fought the 2019 law and has tried to repeal it since. This year, Spectrum has help from Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, two of the world’s largest data mining and advertising properties.
Facebook’s business model is to follow your travels online – even when you’re not on Facebook – and sell everything it knows about you to politicians, influence operations, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, companies backed by foreign governments, or anyone else who will pay. In sum: When a service is free, you are the product.
And Big Tech is now using what they learn about our private lives to predict, model, and modify our behavior. Paying customers in the market for our private lives are bidding for the power to know, predict, nudge and influence us toward their ends. Creepy stuff.
Meta/Facebook and a number of other big tech companies have hired a battalion of local lobbyists to get a weak “privacy” law through the Maine Legislature. The bill language hasn’t been released yet, but lobbyists for Facebook and Spectrum are presenting it as similar to industry-written bills snuck through less vigilant state legislatures elsewhere that lock in the low-protection status quo. Those bills classify a small amount of your online data as “sensitive,” and then permit free trading of the rest. They know, of course, that they’ll still have plenty of freedom to paint, and sell, that digital portrait of you, perhaps just removing a pixel or two.
Big Tech wants to make sure the rest of the country doesn’t follow Maine’s lead in protecting consumer privacy, and Spectrum wants to be free to sell your data again, without restrictions.
Some state legislatures, including lawmakers in Massachusetts, are working on bills to strengthen privacy protections that build upon Maine’s achievement. This should be Maine’s path, as well. Maine should continue to strengthen its privacy protections and continue leading the nation in making sure our private lives are not for sale. Readers concerned about their privacy should call their legislators and ask them if they agree.
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