Competing Bipartisan COVID-19 Privacy Bills To Be Introduced

Two federal data privacy bills may soon be introduced before Congress — The COVID-19 Consumer Data Protection Act, introduced by Republican Senators, and the Public Health Emergency Privacy Act, introduced by a group of Democratic Senators and Representatives. The proposed bills would both create privacy requirements specifically for health and location information collected for the purposes of tracking and preventing the spread of COVID-19.

Since technology is emerging as a key tool in controlling the spread of the coronavirus, the bills seek to ensure that entities that collect and process personal information for COVID-19 purposes (for example, to create contact tracing apps or programs) abide by certain data transparency, notice and consent rules when developing and rolling out technologies that may be collecting sensitive health and location data.