More candidates announced that they are throwing their hats into the 2020 presidential race, with one of the latest declarations coming from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who promises to focus on data privacy regulations.
After posing the rhetorical question of what she would do as President, Klobuchar said she would protect consumer privacy.
“We need to put some digital rules of the road into law when it comes to privacy,” Klobuchar said in her announcement on 10 February, according to TwinCities.com.
“For too long the big tech companies have been telling you: ‘Don’t worry! We’ve got your back!’ while your identities in fact are being stolen and your data is mined. Our laws need to be as sophisticated as the people who are breaking them. We must revamp our nation’s cybersecurity and guarantee net neutrality.”
In addition to her promise to put forth legislation to protect consumer data from being misused by tech giants, Klobuchar also spoke of her support for net neutrality as an imperative to ensure that every household is able to be connected to the internet by 2020.
As the campaign trail gets underway, candidates can expect to be the target of malicious online activity from trolls to bots that spread misinformation, another reason why Klobuchar is driven to move data privacy regulations forward in the US.
In an interview with NPR today, Kelly Jones, news intelligence journalist at Storyful, said, “I think that the idea of automation or suspicious accounts is going to be an ongoing theme through the election. Obviously, the idea of memeing is going to be a theme because these people who are posting this content are creating these images to cause political discourse. And, in fact, one poster we saw on a fringe network claimed that they memed Trump into presidency.”