The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
E. Mathias Kamin III is a business owner, hard cider maker and community organizer who is collecting signatures to run as an independent for District 12 in the Maine House of Representatives.
Nearly two years ago, I opened the doors of my small business, Bon Vent Cider in Hancock. The vision of owning a cidery first came to me in 2003, while I was studying abroad and met cidermakers who had dedicated their lives to the craft. I spent most of my adult life gaining the skills, relationships, and capital necessary to take the leap into entrepreneurship. Today, beyond serving cider, Bon Vent hosts open music jam sessions, local music and arts performances, and community events.
Advertising has helped our success. Generous news coverage in outlets like the Bangor Daily News and WABI 5, underwriting on WERU Community Radio, and word of mouth have spread our name and brought people through our doors. I have also paid for ads on Facebook and Instagram. In all honesty, advertising on social media is fairly expensive, and I haven’t seen much return as far as I can tell. That is precisely why I support LD 1822. I believe it will improve the power of small businesses to grow through online advertising.
In online advertising today, ad tech companies receive a deluge of data. This deluge is so vast and varied that separating the chaff from the wheat is simply impossible. LD 1822’s data minimization provision, the bill’s core feature, promises to fix that. LD 1822 would prevent the businesses it regulates (those who collect data about more than 35,000 Mainers) from collecting data they do not need for the good or the service they are providing. In other words, under LD 1822, the data that businesses can collect will be connected to what the consumer wants. I believe this will lead to higher quality data — more wheat than chaff. That, in turn, will improve the advertising.
Although my business is too small to be regulated by LD 1822, I still run ads on the platforms of tech giants like Facebook and Google. The only way LD 1822 will make my ads less effective is by giving consumers the power to opt out of targeted advertising. That is just basic decency; of course we should let people opt out. Those who want to prevent consumers from having this power apparently think little of consumers, or of the concept of consent. I do not want to force anyone to see my ads.
The Maine Mariners and Sea Dogs, owned by wealthy out-of-staters, recently opposed this bill. I believe they get the bill woefully wrong. It is false that LD 1822 would prevent either team from advertising on platforms like Facebook and Instagram to people who have never visited the sports’ team’s websites. What LD 1822 would do is prevent websites like Facebook from using the data it gets from a Sea Dogs ad to then steer that sports fan to a competitor.
LD 1822 is a compromise bill. It does not go as far as the privacy advocates want it to go. It exempts nonprofits and trade associations like the Chamber of Commerce. It lacks a private right of action, leaving enforcement to the state attorney general. It is not perfect, but it gets us from zero, where we are now, to 85% of the way there. I can live with that.
Most importantly, I value my community and our democracy. We live in difficult times. LD 1822 would ban the sale of sensitive data, including health data, precise geolocation, immigration status, gender identity, religious beliefs, any data about minors, and social security numbers. This is the kind of information election manipulators use to divide us by targeting us with disinformation. I partly blame the privacy-destroying world of Big Tech for our broken politics, our inability to talk to each other, and our retreat into our silos.
I founded Bon Vent Cider to serve as a refuge from our fractured world. Please help me grow my business, and let’s protect our fragile democracy by supporting Rep. Amy Kuhn’s LD 1822.
