Data privacy and political distrust: corporate ‘pro liars,’ ‘gridlocked Congress,’ and the Twitter issue public around the US privacy legislation

ABSTRACT

This study explores how emerging US data privacy regulations are discussed at state and federal levels, examining Twitter discourse around Senate public hearings on data privacy and public forums on the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The recent legal steps reflect growing public outcry over corporate data misuses and lack of appropriate legislation. The findings suggest that the issue public of Twitter users in this study largely considered corporations and the government as untrustworthy actors for privacy legislation. The political distrust was raising doubts over regulatory capture and if a future US federal privacy law will be weaker than state laws (e.g., CCPA) while overriding them. The study explores implications of the findings on the current deadlock over the state preemption clause in developing a comprehensive federal privacy law. I argue that the emerging regulatory efforts on data privacy may not be effective unless the public trust in institutions is regained in the US and that the continuing absence of a federal law amid the political distrust can leave people with limited individual privacy strategies as a result.

KEYWORDS:

• Data privacy
• Twitter
• issue public
• political trust
• CCPA

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Margaret McLaughlin, Dr. Nathaniel (Ming) Curran, Andrea Alarcon, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their helpful feedback on the earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The hearing was mainly about anti-trust yet it also encompassed privacy issues and data practices of the giant tech companies (Renieris, 2020).

2 Bot detection was conducted as follows. First, top 10 Twitter handles who propagated most tweets of the top 10 exact duplicates were identified (in total, 100 Twitter handles for each dataset). Then, I ran Botometer for the Twitter handles and detected the ones whose score ranked over 2.5 out of 5 (Badawy et al., 2018). I manually checked the timelines of the Twitter accounts with over 2.5 Botometer score, following the method used by Ferrara (2017).

3 Note: A tweet can be coded for more than one theme, and the percentages shown in Figure 2 don't necessarily add up to 100%.

4 All the examplar tweets introduced in the result section were paraphrased to protect the privacy of the Twitter users, unless the tweets are headlines of external sources or from highly public figures such as verified accounts.

5 These bills include AB1760 (Privacy for All bill) and AB3119 (which urged to regulate sharing of data beyond sales of data), both introduced by Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks and supported by privacy and civil rights groups.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeeyun (Sophia) Baik

Jeeyun (Sophia) Baik is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, and her research focuses on the issues of data privacy and networked surveillance. [email: [email protected]].