When Rep. Doug Clemens heard rumors that voice assistants double as surveillance mechanisms, he thought it was a wive’s tale.
“It is not a wive’s tale,” he said. “Those devices actually do record your conversations and they are stored on databases in corporate America. We all have those little devices in our living rooms that we ask to play a song or search for something on the internet.”
Examples of voice assistants and smart home devices include Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google's Assistant.
“There are other things stored too like our fingerprints, retina scans, and that sort of stuff and we don't have legal rights to our own biometric data,” Clemens told the St. Louis Record. “I want to change that for Missourians. I want to make sure that we're secure in our privacy from corporations and the state.”
Clemens is vowing to count Missouri among the states that have laws to protect biometric information from being retained by introducing Biometric Information Protection Act (BIPA) legislation.
“I've got a law right now, as a matter of fact, I just did some tweaks to it today with a couple of attorneys,” he said. “I have been working on this bill for months. It hasn't been filed yet but it's in the final stages. I hope to file it either this week or beginning of next. Hopefully, I can get it heard within a month after filing. That would be nice.”
States that have BIPA legislation include Texas, Illinois, Washington, California, New York, and Arkansas.
“I'm getting great feedback on both sides of the aisle,” Clemens said. “If there's any opposition to this, I think it's going to fall under the language selected and possible unintended consequences in which case we'll talk about the language and amend if necessary. But at this point, in terms of the idea behind the bill, I think both Republicans and Democrats agree that your private life should remain private.”
Because employers nationwide are increasingly using thermal scanners, facial recognition scanners or other similar technology to screen for COVID-19, there has been a rise in class action lawsuits filed on behalf of workers by plaintiff’s lawyers, according to media reports.
“What’s come to light is that courts have subpoenaed the corporations to release that data as part of investigations and trial proceedings and, at this point in several cases, those recordings have been made available to courts and investigators under subpoena,” Clemens added. “Without ever having a search warrant for the private premises of a home, they're getting access to private data of the house by going through a third party corporation and nobody gave permission.”