Bill would keep email providers from selling info

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  • Bill would keep email providers from selling info
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OKLAHOMA CITY – A bill filed in the state House of Representatives would protect email privacy by preventing email service providers from selling information contained in messages they convey.

“No email service provider shall conduct any form of scanning of the subject lines or body of any email communication sent to or by any of its clients,” nor shall an email service provider “allow any other person, whether directly or indirectly, to perform a scan of any such email communications,” decrees House Bill 2810, the Oklahoma E-Mail Communication Content Privacy Protection Act.

Rep. Collin Walke, author of HB 2810, said he doesn’t want the U.S. Postal Service “knowing when and how I read my mail,” nor does he desire to have Google or Microsoft “knowing what I send and receive in my email.”

Vast amounts of personal information are being collected via internet transactions and are being used to “manipulate your behavior,” the Oklahoma City Democrat said. “If you open Explorer, for example, all of your internet activity is being monitored and tracked,” he said. Walke said he was prompted to file the bill after reading two books:

• Zucked by Roger McNa- mee, a Silicon Valley investor who came to the “dawning realization” that Facebook “is being manipulated by some very bad actors”; and

• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, who relates “the consequences as ... vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new ‘behavioral futures markets,’ where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new ‘means of behavioral modification’.”

“I’ve always been a Luddite,” Walke quipped. Luddites were 19th-century workers who destroyed machinery which they believed was threatening their jobs. In contemporary parlance, a Luddite is someone who’s opposed to new technology.

HB 2810 is among 2,240 bills and resolutions pre-filed in the state House and Senate for consideration after the Second Regular Session of the 57th Oklahoma Legislature convenes Feb. 3.