Back to the drawing board on data privacy in Maine
Back to the drawing board on data privacy in Maine
Publish Date: 2026-02-22 04:00:00
Source Domain: www.pressherald.com
Here we are again, folks: Maine is considering a sweeping data privacy bill.
We were last here in 2024, when legislators debated a new regulatory framework for data privacy in the state. The new bill is substantively different, reflecting enormous changes in our national political and regulatory environments in a very short time.
Two years ago, regulating data privacy in the United States was in the frontier stage. The federal government, split between a Republican Congress and a Democratic president, was doing nothing on the issue in the midst of an election year — and it still hasn’t. At the state level, very few states had passed any data privacy laws, and none were as sweeping as the one proposed in Maine in 2024. We would have been at the forefront and, as a relatively small state, we would have shouldered the cost of litigation early.
Since then, more than a dozen states have either passed new data privacy laws or implemented and enforced them. They’ve been passed in Republican- and Democrat-controlled states alike, although the versions differ from state to state. Maine’s newest version under consideration —LD 1822, An Act to Enact the Maine Online Data Privacy Act, which has passed the Maine House in an initial vote — is more restrained than what was considered two years ago. Still, it leans more toward the California model of a data privacy law than the Texas one.
Unlike the prior iteration, this new bill does not create a whole new state agency to enforce the legislation. Enforcement is left to the Maine Attorney General, as is typical with many other consumer protection laws here. This bill works within the existing structure, and that’s important: it both reduces cost and avoids setting a new precedent that could be followed down the road in other fields. We don’t need a separate agency for every industry to enforce consumer protections in a small state like Maine.
The new version of the bill also doesn’t…
