Companies would be barred from selling the location data generated by people’s cellphones under a bill that supporters say should be a top priority for Beacon Hill lawmakers.
“In this critical moment — and believe me, it’s a very critical moment — as we actively explore how Massachusetts can act at the state level to protect our residents in this current political climate, shielding our location data needs to rise to the top of that list,” Senate Majority Leader Cindy Creem said at a Wednesday hearing. “It needs to be number one. Our location data reveals some of the most sensitive details about us. This personal information can provide insight into our health care providers, religious affiliation, and even our sexual orientation.”
Creem, of Newton, is one of the bill’s lead sponsors and the Senate’s number-two Democrat. Attorney General Andrea Campbell also wants to see the bill passed.
Progressive groups for months have called for state action to protect cellphone location data, framing it as safeguard against the reproductive rights landscape potentially shifting further under the Trump administration. Backers include the ACLU of Massachusetts, Reproductive Equity Now, the Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action, the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, and Jane Doe Inc., a coalition against sexual assault and domestic violence.
“At a time of rising extremism, reckless profiteering, and chaos emanating from the federal government and Silicon Valley, digital privacy and online consumer protection has never been more important,” Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “And of all the threats to our privacy and safety, the sale of precise geolocation data is one of the most pressing.”
The bill could be a target for relatively early action in a Legislature that has been slow out of the gate this session. State representatives and senators were sworn in for a new two-year term in January and have passed two laws since then.
Some of the bill’s backers described data privacy as a nonpartisan issue.
House lawmakers voted 159-0 last July to pass a narrower bill banning the collection and sale of location data for people seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care, but the state Senate never took up the legislation.
Rep. David Vieira, a Falmouth Republican who joined Melrose Democrat Rep. Kate Lipper-Garabedian to file this year’s House version of the bill , said the issues of abortion and transgender health care may divide lawmakers.
But, Vieira said, Democrats and Republicans in the House “came together without regard for political ideology.”
“As I said on the day that we had the unanimous vote in the House in the last session, privacy is a fundamental human right,” he said. “And that human right underpins our freedom of association, thought, expression, as well as freedom from discrimination.”
Looking beyond the health care realm, Lipper-Garabedian said the bill that’s now under consideration would also protect domestic violence survivors, people belonging to religious minorities, judges and public safety officials.
The Legislature’s Committee on Advanced Information Technology, the Internet and Cybersecurity is also weighing other data privacy and cybersecurity bills, some of which would also impose guardrails on location data.
Representatives of TechNet and the State Privacy and Security Coalition, groups that both count Amazon, Google and Meta among their clients, asked lawmakers to support a wide-ranging bill dubbed the Comprehensive Massachusetts Consumer Data Privacy Act.
They said that legislation mirrors the path taken by other states, making it easier for companies to comply. Along with other measures, it would allow consumers to opt out of having their data processed for sale or targeted advertising.
“By following a model that is already in place, the cost to companies doing business in the commonwealth is orders of magnitude less than if the state advances its own unique standard, which would require custom compliance solutions,” TechNet’s Chris Gilrein said.
Gilrein said a “piecemeal approach,” like restricting just location information, would be “more complicated from a policy perspective and still require a complex compliance infrastructure.”
A new rule state representatives adopted this year caps the amount of time committees can take to consider House bills. That gives the committee until June 8 to decide whether to advance the data privacy bills heard Wednesday.
