Biden Renews Call for Federal Privacy Law in State of the Union Address

President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address urged lawmakers to support a federal privacy law and warned against the dominance of Big Tech. To that, Biden sought tougher rules to resolve privacy and competition issues, along with banning ads targeting children.

“Pass bipartisan legislation to strengthen antitrust enforcement and prevent big online platforms from giving their own products an unfair advantage,” Biden said. “It’s time to pass bipartisan legislation to stop Big Tech from collecting personal data on kids and teenagers online, ban targeted advertising to children and impose stricter limits on the personal data these companies collect on all of us.”

Biden called for similar measures at last year’s State of the Union as well. Children’s digital safety has been a concern among Congress and the Biden administration, exacerbated after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked internal company documents detailing its grip on children and the mental health risks associated with platforms like Instagram. Although a federal privacy bill saw some momentum last year, it was nixed soon after.

While trade bodies criticize blanket bills that limit the scope of digital advertising, it may not be the end-all for advertisers who have adjusted to coping with data and signal loss over the last few years.

“We’ve seen for decades that advertising works very well even with the lower precision of contextual targeting,” said the Advertising Research Foundation’s Scott McDonald. “New legislation may cause near-term harm to ad tech, but marketers can still make smart data-driven decisions using improved econometric and marketing mix models.”

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)—whose members include Google, Amazon, and Meta—supported Biden’s call for federal privacy law. However, the trade body rallied against a blanket ban on ads targeting children.

“Punishing bad actors is a must, and IAB supports stronger laws to protect kids, but blaming data and technology for complex problems and restricting or eliminating digital advertising could severely diminish the benefits of the internet for everyone,” Lartease Tiffith, evp for public policy at the IAB, told Adweek via an email.

At its annual leadership meeting in Florida last month, IAB CEO David Cohen called out some privacy advocates as “extremists” and “political opportunists,” including chair of the Federal Trade Commission Lina Khan, who “have made it their mission to cripple the advertising industry and eliminate it from the American economy and culture.”

Cohen’s “acerbic” tone was rejected by the Association of National Advertisers, the ad industry’s oldest and largest trade association who do not believe the IAB’s posture is sufficiently balanced.

While comprehensive federal privacy legislation may be a tough deliverable for Congress in 2023, protecting children’s privacy is seeing more movement on the Hill.