Protecting the Virtual You: Safeguarding Americans’ Online Data

Statement of Alan Butler, Executive Director, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). Hearing on “Protecting the Virtual You: Safeguarding Americans’ Online Data Before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, July 30, 2025. “Chair Blackburn, Ranking Member Klobuchar, and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for holding this hearing and for the opportunity to testify today on the need to better safeguard Americans’ online data. My name is Alan Butler, and I am Executive Director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. EPIC is an independent nonprofit research organization established in 1994 to secure the right to privacy in the digital age for all people. Privacy is a fundamental right, and our laws should clearly limit the collection and use of our data and protect against abusive practices that unfairly target us based on who we are, where we have been, and what we believe. Americans deserve a law that actually protects their data online; not one that creates more check boxes or that makes them read a long contract before they order take-out or watch a news clip. I commend this subcommittee for taking on the important work of analyzing these problems and identifying real solutions. The status quo is untenable. If the law allows a company to scrape images of all of our faces to build a universal facial recognition database, while another company tracks every site we visit, and link we click, to build invasive profiles of us, and yet another company buys and sells a detailed log of our daily movements and activities, do we have privacy protection at all? I believe that any reasonable person would say no, and demand that our lawmakers step in to fix this broken system and unlock the endless potential of our digital ecosystem when privacy protection is built in from the ground up. We need clear rules of the road for the digital frontier, which should include limits on the sale of our data and the use of our sensitive information, including a clear prohibition on tracking our online behavior over time and across apps and sites and strict limits on the use of our location data and biometric data. These rules will protect us from fraudsters, stalkers, and scams and put individual Americans back in control of their own personal information. Furthermore, they will encourage privacy-protective innovation that can improve and expand our online world…”

• See also video of the entire hearing and download witness transcripts – Protecting the Virtual You: Safeguarding Americans’ Online Data