FTC

The ban amends Virginia's Consumer Data Protection Act and took effect this week, joining Maryland and Oregon. It targets a real harm: location feeds have already been used to track visitors to hundreds of Planned Parenthood clinics for an anti-abortion ad campaign.

The thread's privacy lawyers zeroed in on the wording. Maryland and Oregon ban exchanges for 'monetary or other valuable consideration'; Virginia only says 'monetary.' That one missing clause is exactly the gap the license-plate-camera firms already live in — sell the cameras, hand over the dashboard 'for free.'

The EU Commission's 2023 adequacy decision leaned on the US FTC as an independent privacy enforcer, citing it 259 times. On 29 June the Supreme Court ruled the FTC is not independent of the President at all.

Max Schrems' group noyb says that collapses the legal ground under EU-US data transfers, and the only clean fix is a unanimous EU treaty change. A Schrems III case is already being drafted.