Bill to prohibit selling, licensing, or trading health and location data

Senator Warren has introduced a bill to prohibit "selling, licensing or trading" people's health and location data. This bill makes a valliant attempt, but falls short at two levels.

First, it has a specific loophole: it fails to cover answering questions about users' personal data. If a company refuses to give, sell or trade the data itself, but will answer simple questions about what the data say, enough answers will enable the questioner to determine the data exactly. If each question has two possible answers, the questioner can learn one bit of data per question. It won't take data brokers more than a minute to think of this tactic.

Second, more deeply, it only applies to providing data to other companies. It does nothing to stop the government from accessing the data. For instance, it won't protect people who get abortions.

Finally, it is limited by design to only some sorts of personal data.

In general, the reliable way to protect privacy is to prevent any entity from accumulating people's sensitive personal data unless it is absolutely inevitable.