Seeking to give Floridians control over their own data, freedom from web censorship, and protection for their children online, Gov. Ron DeSantis on June 6 signed a bill creating a Digital Bill of Rights for the state.
“If a multibillion-dollar company is conspiring to take your data and sell it or use it against you, it is your right to be able to protect that data,” DeSantis said in a statement released by his office. “No longer will the Big Tech oligarchs be able to commandeer your personal information and deprive you of the right to access, confirm, or delete that data as you wish.”
The bill, Senate Bill 262, gives residents of the third most populous state several rights. They can confirm, access, and delete their data on a social media platform. They have the right to know their data won’t be used against them in buying a home, obtaining health insurance, or being hired. They have the right to opt out of having their personal data sold. They have the right to protect their children from personal data collection.
The bill adds biometric data and geolocation information to the definition of personal data, the governor’s office said, “ensuring that Big Tech companies are not collecting your personal identifying information or tracking your day-to-day movements.”
The bill bans state or local government employees from coordinating with a Big Tech company to police or censor protected speech.
After more than a week of campaigning following his announcement for president on May 24, DeSantis held a signing ceremony in Wildwood, just outside The Villages, a large retirement community and GOP stronghold.
He cited outrage over disclosures that Internet companies had coordinated with the national health bureaucracy led by Dr. Anthony Fauci to suppress dissent over national COVID-19 policies. Government officials in Florida are now banned from doing that.
The bill bans online platforms that target children from collecting, selling, or sharing a child’s personal data. Nor can a child’s data be retained that isn’t essential for providing the online service.
A related bill DeSantis signed recently, Senate Bill 662, the Student Online Personal Information Protection Act, “substantially restricts online operators from collecting, disclosing, or selling student data that is used for school purposes,” the governor’s office said.
DeSantis injected a few personal notes into his speech, saying his own young children often punch in searches on their parents’ cellphones.
“It’s very difficult with kids. Because our kids, 6, 5 and 3, you know, they‘ll grab our phones and they’ll just start typing stuff in. As you know, they know how to do this stuff very quickly,” he said.
He said when he first met Casey at a driving range in 2006, they decided to go somewhere else to talk. They went in separate cars. DeSantis, a Navy officer new to the Jacksonville area, was worried that they'd get separated. He hadn’t gotten her phone number yet.
“I had no idea where I was going because I didn’t have a map on the phone. It was just a flip phone then. Finally, I found a place, we pulled over and met there, and the rest is history,” he said.
“It’s just that, in our lifetime, the idea that you should be able to just type in something on a device, and they match you where you want to go. That was not how it was for most of our lives.
Big Tech Agenda
“I think we’ve seen with some of these big tech companies, how they use their power to advance their agenda, how they’ve used their power to commandeer the personal information of individual Americans.“And so we want to make sure that we’re providing protection for Floridians to speak their mind on these platforms, making sure that government is not colluding with these companies to try to stifle speech, like we’ve seen in recent history,” he said.
An earlier law, the 2021 Big Tech censorship bill, requires social media advertising as open platforms to enforce their content rules evenly. It also allows Floridians to seek redress if discriminated against for their viewpoints, DeSantis said. The Attorney General can go after tech companies who are in violation for unfair and deceptive trade practices, he said.
Disclosures since then, he said, alluding to the Twitter files released by new owner Elon Musk this spring for publication by journalist Matt Taibbi, show the problems “are even much worse than we thought.”
“The fusion of government and tech for the purpose of censoring things that descend from the official narrative, that’s a huge, huge threat to freedom of speech.”
State Rep. Fiona McFarland, the bill’s House sponsor, said they'd been at work on it since 2019 as a priority for DeSantis and two consecutive House speakers.
“It’s taken us a long time to get this bill right,” said McFarland, a Republican. “Because every company out there knows the most important thing they have is our data. It is more valuable than gold at this point.”
DeSantis said they sought to strike the right balance in the bill to protect rights while avoiding frivolous lawsuits.
Larry John of The Villages, a retired Iowa judge who volunteers with Seniors vs Crime, said seniors are all-too-easy targets for fraud and swindling.
“One reason they’re victimized is because they put information about themselves out for public consumption. They go on Facebook and tell everybody what their profile is. They have shopped for things and so everybody knows where, and what their tastes are. As the governor said, they can track us, they know exactly where we are, whether we’re visiting our relatives. They know a lot about us.”
The new bill helps protect against that kind of data mining, he said.
Hernando County School Board member Monty Floyd, a father of four, said it was essential to protect children from “aggressive marketing tactics, which almost always involve an agenda that conflicts with our family’s values and what we feel is appropriate for our children.”
June presents a particular challenge, he said, alluding to the torrent of LGBT information that is part of Pride Month. “My wife and I are not alone in having to play parental goaltender throughout the entire month. It’s not easy being a parent in this age. But June really ups the difficulty to an entirely new level.”
He said a recent Washington Post story revealed shocking data harvesting involving children: companies harvest 72 million data points on an average child by the time he is 13.
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