The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) writes in regard to SB 262 which is up for a hearing in the Senate Committee on Commerce and Tourism today. We are appreciative of your dedication to protecting the privacy of Florida consumers. While we are encouraged by the ongoing efforts to establish guardrails for businesses in Florida, we are concerned that this bill misses the mark and will have a negative impact on Florida residents and businesses.

At a minimum, we urge Florida policymakers to amend the bill’s extremely broad opt-out provisions related to “sales” and “sharing” to align with the approach taken in the Virginia, Colorado, Utah, and Iowa privacy laws. All of those laws provide consumers with the right to opt-out of “sales” and “targeted advertising,” and define those terms in a way that captures practices that may raise privacy concerns for some consumers (e.g., sales of data to data brokers, use of data from multiple websites to target ads), but excludes important uses of non-sensitive data, such as contextual advertising and ad measurement.