May 2023 U.S. Tech Policy Roundup

Kennedy Patlan, Rachel Lau, and Carly Cramer work with leading public interest foundations and nonprofits on technology policy issues at Freedman Consulting, LLC. Alondra Solis, a Freedman Consulting Phillip Bevington policy & research intern, also contributed to this article. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testifies before a Senate subcommittee on May 16, 2023. In May, ongoing debates about the ethical use of AI came to a head when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. Altman encouraged policymakers to create a new agency dedicated to regulating emerging technologies. He was also among a group of influential tech CEOs and AI researchers who signed a statement encouraging society to mitigate the “risk of extinction” due to the rise of artificial intelligence.  At the agency level, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is coordinating an investigation into the pharmaceutical digital advertising market through its inquiry into a sector-shifting merger between IQVIA and PropelMedia. The agency also banned Easy Healthcare (creators of fertility tracking app Premom) from sharing consumer data with advertisers, and it released a policy statement on biometric information and its potential to pose harm to consumer privacy and data security, as well as its susceptibility to promoting bias and discrimination. In addition, the FTC released a proposed rule to amend the agency’s Health Breach Notification Rule to “better explain” the rule’s application for digital health apps and platforms that do not fall under HIPAA.  News reports revealed that the TSA is using…May 2023 U.S. Tech Policy Roundup