World News for Students of English

02-07-2019 07:00

Bipartisan American senators are introducing legislation that would make big tech companies like Facebook and Google disclose how much money they make using your data.

Last Monday, senators Josh Hawley and Mark Warner introduced the Designing Accounting Safeguards to Help Broaden Oversight and Regulations on Data, aka the DASHBOARD Act. This bill would make companies with more than 100 million monthly users inform users what data is being collected on them and how it is being used. Users would also be given the ability to delete that data. Senator Warner said that media companies told people that their product are free which is not true. People do not pay with money but with their data.

The companies would also have to make a yearly report on the total value of the user data and say with which other companies they shared the data. Senator Hawley says that tech companies sell people’s data to the highest bidder and that the bill gives people control and shows them how much these ‘free’ services really cost.

Facebook and Goggle have not commented on the bill yet.

Difficult words: bipartisan (of two different parties, which usually do not agree with each other), disclose (say something which was secret in the past), bill (a law for discussion in the government or parliament).

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