This week in our March Privacy Forecast, we discuss a growing
trend at both the federal and the state level – new laws and
regulations that specifically target data brokers.
Federal-Level Data Broker Laws and
Regulations
At the federal level, two new legal frameworks have direct
implications for data brokers. First, the Protecting Americans' Data From
Foreign Adversaries Act (PADFA) – which went into effect
on June 23, 2024 – generally prohibits "data
brokers" from selling, licensing, or transferring for
consideration an American's "personally identifiable
sensitive data" to certain "foreign adversary"
countries (i.e., China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran) or to any
entity "controlled" by those foreign adversary countries.
Second, the new
Department of Justice rule on cross-border data transactions
– which is set to take effect on April 8, 2025 –
includes strict prohibitions on data brokerage, which is defined
more broadly than under PADFA to include "the sale
