United States President Joe Biden will issue an executive order that will keep personal information safe from countries that are seen as unfriendly or a threat.
People who sell other people’s data to “countries of concern” are the main reason for the order. The Biden Administration is worried about this because it’s a regular business to do. Concerns have been raised about China, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Hong Kong, and Macau.
People used to worry that the Chinese Communist Party had access to a lot of U.S. data, which could be dangerous for national security. The main kinds of information that interest them are health, geographic, genetic, biometric, financial, and personal identification data.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said, “Our enemies are using the private information of Americans to put our national security at risk.” He went on to say, “They are buying this data to use to blackmail and spy on people, go after people they see as dissidents in the United States, and do other bad things.”
Government officials have said that they will use “civil and criminal remedies” against people who break the new data rules once they are in place. The paper did say that the severity and type of punishments would “depend on the facts and circumstances of the violation, including the adequacy of any compliance program.”
The US is looking into possible data breaches and has found problems with cargo cranes that were coded and made with Chinese resources. This means that even these cranes could be hacked and used to steal data. Given this, a group of politicians contacted several companies, including Equifax, and asked them about the ways they gather and share information. They wrote in their letter, “Concerns about American privacy in the data broker industry are not new, and current laws do not protect Americans’ data from misuse well enough.”
