Editorial: Federal privacy bill has a big hole

Published 10:00 am Wednesday, June 10, 2026

Privacy is losing. And the SECURE Data Act is another in a series of Congressional attempts to create an overall federal policy to protect consumer data from being scooped up.

It does make sense to have a federal policy, rather than every state designing its own laws. But Oregon Rep. Cliff Bentz, a Republican, raised a key problem with any proposed fix for privacy laws based on personal consent.

If you are like Bentz, or us for that matter, you just click approve and don’t bother to read the pages of the “terms of use” or “terms of service” agreements.

“What good, I asked, is a right to such consent if you don’t read all those pages of ‘lawyer-ese’ language, or worse, if you do but don’t understand it?” Bentz wrote.

You can find some of what he said about the bill here: tinyurl.com/Bentzprivacy.

The bill doesn’t propose a solution to this problem. It calls for a study. To be fair, there is no easy answer.

There are other challenges in the bill, as well.

It should be easy to opt out of sharing your data across every website. The bill does not have that.

There is a section of the bill called “data minimization.” It doesn’t minimize much of any consumer data capture. It allows collection of personal consumer data up to what is reasonably necessary “to each purpose for which the data is processed as disclosed to the consumer.” When consumers aren’t fully reading disclosures, that is virtually meaningless.

Some states do have stronger consumer privacy laws than this federal law. They would be superseded by the bill.

Consumers would not be able to sue companies for lack of compliance with this law directly. It would be up to the federal government or state attorneys general. Some consumers won’t…

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