Politics
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AUGUSTA, Maine — A Democrat in the Maine Senate wants to change a sweeping data privacy bill to exempt political groups and allow them to keep collecting high volumes of consumer data that businesses could not have.
The proposed change was filed Thursday by Sen. Anne Carney, D-Cape Elizabeth, who co-chairs the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee. It came just before the Senate was set to take up the measure that passed the House last month. The complex issue is still emerging across the country and has been subject to thorny negotiations here since 2023.
Maine’s bill would be perhaps the most sweeping data privacy bill passed in any state so far. Carney’s amendment was a notable example of lawmakers carving out their own activities from a bill that has been opposed by many Maine businesses who say it will effectively ban online advertising targeted at certain demographics that companies rely on.
Senators were on the floor late Thursday morning. Carney and a spokesperson for Senate Democrats did not respond to a request for comment.
It would grant Mainers extensive rights over their personal information while imposing strict data minimization, security and transparency obligations on businesses operating here. Under most circumstances, the bill would apply to businesses that process the personal information of 35,000 or consumers. Nonprofits, governments and tribes would be exempt.
“The right to control our personal information is essential in the digital era,” Rep. Amy Kuhn, D-Falmouth, said in testimony last year.
Features of Maine’s bill are relatively common across the 20 states to pass comprehensive data privacy laws. But most of those states allow consumers to opt into data collection, whereas Kuhn’s bill would not. Consumers would also be able to know exactly to whom businesses sell data. Most of the other states allow them to only know categories of businesses.
Two different types of data privacy bills have been jousting for support in the Maine Legislature. Kuhn’s is an aggressive version that is backed by civil liberties advocates and opposed by many businesses, while lawmakers killed a rival proposal last year that follows many of the laws in other states and is backed by tech companies.
L.L. Bean and HospitalityMaine, an advocacy group for hotels and restaurants, have been among the more prominent opponents of Kuhn’s bill and a similar one in the past Legislature. The latter group said last year that the current bill would make Maine “an outlier.”
