It’s somewhat stunning to realize that the United States has been operating with Surgeon Generals that are merely “acting” in the role or “performing the duties of” since January 20th of 2025. The last Senate-confirmed SG was Dr. Vivek Murthy. The current nominee from the Trump/Kennedy team is Dr. Casey Means. This nomination has been languishing since May of last year. There has been plenty of pushback on her, due largely to her current profession as “wellness influencer” and the fact that she didn’t complete her residency and doesn’t have a license to practice in any of our 50 states.
She recently went before the Senate for her confirmation hearing and it, um, didn’t go all that well. As a result, it appears her nomination is very much in trouble. There are several GOP senators who are publicly expressing doubts about her, perhaps none more important then Bill Cassidy.
Senators Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) all expressed concern in a confirmation hearing last month about her potential role and appear to remain doubtful. Just one of those senators may be enough to block her nomination from advancing beyond the Senate Health Committee.
Afterward, Senators Collins and Murkowski both said they still had questions. Murkowski also said she had “strong reservations” about Means’ nomination and that, as of last week, that opinion hadn’t changed, according to the Post.
So why did the confirmation hearing go so poorly? For some reasons you’d expect, and some you probably didn’t. Means mostly ducked questions about vaccines, giving interested senators no idea where she actually lands on the issue. There were also perfectly reasonable questions about her qualifications, given that she is not currently a practicing doctor of any kind. In her influencer career, she has mirrored much of what RFK Jr. has claimed about diet and exercise being the cure to most health issues, all while hocking your stereotypical supplements and magic potions.
But then there are the drugs and the lunar-worship.
A book that she co-authored with her brother, titled Good Energy, considered by some to be the “MAHA bible,” contains a chapter titled, “Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor.” She has also drawn criticism for writing about taking magic mushrooms, consulting a “spiritual medium,” and participating in “full moon ceremonies.”
I won’t say I’m against the use of psychedelics generally, but I typically don’t love hearing about how great they are from my doctor.
As we’ve talked about before, it has become very clear that Kennedy simply lied a whole bunch in his own confirmation hearings as to what he would do as Secretary at HHS, particularly when it comes to vaccines. The thing about lying to people like Bill Cassidy, though, is now Kennedy needs him to confirm his hand-picked ally for Surgeon General.
And unless Cassidy is far stupider than I think he is, you have to believe he isn’t going to let Lucy pull the football away at the last moment for a second time.
Rinse, lather, repeat. That is supposed to be the self-serving message on the back of a shampoo bottle, but it can easily be applied to Senator Bill Cassidy’s response to all the bullshit RFK Jr. continues to pull when it comes to vaccines.
The last time we saw this was back in October of last year. In the wake of an absolutely insane press conference in which Kennedy and Trump decided to point the finger at Tylenol, of all things, as a major cause of autism spectrum disorder, Cassidy bravely took to social media and the radio to criticize the HHS Secretary for essentially not having a single fucking idea about which he was speaking… and then he did absolutely fuck all about it. And now, days after Kennedy’s CDC altered the agency’s childhood vaccine schedule recommendations, he’s once more out in public spilling all kinds of words in response.
Cassidy, a physician and longtime proponent of vaccinations, said this move will “make America sicker.”
“As a doctor who treated patients for decades, my top priority is protecting children and families. Multiple children have died or were hospitalized from measles, and South Carolina continues to face a growing outbreak. Two children have died in my state from whooping cough. All of this was preventable with safe and effective vaccines,” Cassidy wrote on the social media platform X.
“The vaccine schedule IS NOT A MANDATE. It’s a recommendation giving parents the power. Changing the pediatric vaccine schedule based on no scientific input on safety risks and little transparency will cause unnecessary fear for patients and doctors, and will make America sicker,” he added.
Well, gosh golly gee, Senator, if only there was someone in some kind of position of power that could actually do something about it. Maybe a respected figure in the Republican majority, one who is a doctor by background and who cast and whipped up critical votes to confirm Kennedy’s appointment, who could do more than offer stern warnings about how horrible this is all going to be. I’d like to find someone like that and implore them to take action. Like… any action. Do literally anything other than flap their lips, as though that were accomplishing anything.
The incredible part of all of this is the context in which Kennedy’s betrayal of Cassidy has occurred. According to Cassidy, Kennedy committed to the following, either in confirmation hearings or to him personally:
Not changing vaccine review processes or slowing down vaccine approvals
Leave the CDC’s ACIP committee unchanged
Not changing the CDC website’s language debunking misinformation about vaccines and autism
Basing vaccine approvals and schedule recommendations on established and peer-reviewed science
Lie, lie, lie, and lie! It’s a superfecta of broken promises made to a sitting senator that has the stature, standing, and ability to do something about it. He could back the effort to impeach Kennedy, as he absolutely should. He could hit him in funding. He could haul him before Congress and demand answers, using his bully pulpit to expose the dangers further than some ExTwitter posts.
“Senator Cassidy put his personal political preservation above all by casting the deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr., even after raising many valid concerns over Kennedy’s pursuit of a dangerous anti-vaccine agenda,” said Kayla Hancock, Director of Public Health Watch, a project of Protect Our Care. “It is obvious that Kennedy was always hellbent on pushing vaccine misinformation to AmericansAmericans no matter how much the data and science show them to be safe and effective. And now, with each new baseless attack on vaccine safety and efficacy that Secretary Kennedy carries out — like gutting the child vaccine schedule — more American lives are needlessly put in jeopardy. Dr. Cassidy knows this better than anyone, and it’s time he backs up his empty words of ‘concern’ with serious action.”
Instead, we have Cassidy’s mere words. Inaction is tacit endorsement, as far as I’m concerned. And every day that goes by in which Cassidy continues to not lift a single finger to protect his own constituents at a minimum, and all Americans more generally, is another violation of the Hippocratic Oath he once took.
I’ll start with this: I am certainly not fully politically aligned with Senator Bill Cassidy, but I have typically found him to be genuine and intelligent. Points of disagreement aside, he doesn’t strike me as a grifter or psychopath, which is unfortunately quite rare amongst government these days. He is a doctor, specifically a gastroenterologist, and typically pretty good on medical issues.
But come on, man: do something.
Cassidy was a key vote in confirming our own national embarrassment, RFK Jr., as head of HHS. Kennedy’s chaotic activity during these first nine months is well documented in that link above, but I’m going to reiterate what I said in a post about how polling is demonstrating that the American people are done with Kennedy’s bullshit.
But the context around this is that plenty of GOP members of Congress are looking ahead to the midterms and some percentage of those same people are in districts that are either swing districts or not solidly safe GOP districts. And every bit of chaos that comes out of this administration, and HHS has produced a ton of that chaos, makes the reelection chances of those House and Senate members that much worse.
Cassidy is one of those that are campaigning for reelection at the midterms. He last won in 2020 with 59% of the vote, which wouldn’t strike you as a particularly risky place to be, except he’s getting attacked from both the right and the left. His fellow senators have made it quite clear that they look to his guidance on matters of healthcare, and specifically on how he views and handles RFK Jr. During Kennedy’s most recent congressional hearing, he said many strong and tough things directly to and about Kennedy.
But come on, man: do something.
All we have gotten is words. There has been no public whipping of support to pushback on Kennedy and the disastrous things he’s done for nine months. No public followups from the hearing. No real oversight of any kind. I know this, because Kennedy and Trump recently came out and made the scientifically illiterate claim that pregnant mothers ingesting Tylenol is responsible for the uptick in rates of autism.
Cassidy first addressed the president’s words on X, saying studies don’t back up the claims he made at a clunky press conference on Monday.
“The preponderance of evidence shows that this is not the case,” Cassidy wrote. “The concern is that women will be left with no options to manage pain in pregnancy. We must be compassionate to this problem.” He added that HHS, helmed by vocal health conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “should release the new data that it has to support this claim.”
We already know there is no “new data.” The studies cited by Kennedy and Trump were old studies. The new study that they used to push this unfounded claim didn’t do any new research itself, but rather analyzed a bunch of existing research instead. Oh, and that study’s own authors disagreed with the conclusions Kennedy and Trump drew from it. The data isn’t new, so Cassidy’s request is moot.
Cassidy expanded on all of this on local radio.
The “best” study on Tylenol usage during pregnancy and autism doesn’t back up Trump, he told Talk 107.3 host Brian Haldane.
“There is an article out of Sweden ― two million people followed ― and what they did is they looked at someone who had autism and they compared them to a sibling who did not have autism, and they found no association, effectively, between taking Tylenol or not,” Cassidy pointed out, calling it the “highest quality” and “best controlled” study on the subject.
The findings Trump was referencing Monday appeared to be from “a study which found an association,” he said. “Now that’s the key thing: an association. That doesn’t mean it causes it; it just means that it’s associated.”
Yes, exactly right! Kennedy and the Mad King are going to harm mothers and the unborn with this nonsense. Cassidy is correct that the advice coming from HHS and the goddamned President is not trustworthy, nor based in good science.
But come on, man: do something.
Do something more than words. Back the folks in the House that are seeking to impeach Kennedy. Break with him publicly. Demand more accountability. Haul him before Congress as often as it takes to expose the very real harm that is being done to the health of the American people.
Do no harm, Senator. That’s an oath you once took, before you entered the pretzel-twisted world of federal politics. Your inaction is doing harm.
Well, that was certainly a thing. We mentioned yesterday that RFK Jr. was scheduled to go before the Senate Finance committee to answer all kinds of questions as to just what in the holy hell is happening at HHS. As we said, this was always going to be a contentious hearing, given that the Democrat Senators are aligned, and in fact demanded his resignation before the hearing, while even GOP members such as Bill Cassidy have begun signaling wavering support for Kennedy.
But this wasn’t just contentious; it was a disaster. USA Today has one of many live update pages where you can go back and relive the timeline, but the topline summary is that Kennedy shouted over the Senators questions, often asked them questions instead of answering the questions he was asked, dissembled all over the place when asked direct and honest questions, and otherwise spouted conspiracy theories without a scintilla of evidence to back them up. And while it’s certainly true that questions from Democracts were done in a more hostile tone than those from the GOP, the open disdain, or at least concern, about Kennedy’s actions as of recent was entirely bipartisan.
I’ll give you some highlights, for lack of a better term, along with a summary of the key thing we learned in each highlight.
Mark Warner (D):
Kennedy claims neither he, nor anyone else, has any idea how many Americans died from COVID-19
Kennedy is unwilling to state that COVID vaccines did “anything” to prevent deaths from COVID-19
Kennedy was unaware of some specific implications of the latest budget bill on American healthcare
John Barrasso (R):
Barrasso points out all the chaos and failure that has happened under Kennedy, including the largest measles outbreak in decades.
Kennedy claims that CDC vaccine guidance has never before, in the history of the agency, been “clear, evidence based, and trustworthy.” He claims his leadership is the first time this will ever have happened.
This, by the way, is precisely how you get situations like unhinged people shooting up the CDC’s Atlanta campus. The CDC was born in 1946, initially to combat malaria. But, according to Kennedy, it has never in its entire history been trustworthy on the topic of vaccines. It’s a lie, of course, but those that believe it would logically be very, very pissed off.
Thom Tillis (R):
Tillis starts off by saying he’s going to make a statement and essentially begs Kennedy to not respond in the moment, but to go and gather his answers after the hearing and present them. Kennedy repeatedly attempts to answer those questions anyway.
Tillis points out that based on the myriad of conflicting statements Kennedy made within the hearing, he has no idea whether Kennedy thinks Operation Warp Speed was a good thing or not. On the one hand, Kennedy agrees with Tillis and others that Trump should be a Nobel prize for the government’s efforts in creating the mRNA vaccines. On the other, Kennedy claims the vaccines were deadly and can’t account for them being effective at all.
Tillis asks how a CDC Director can be lauded a month ago and fired four weeks later.
Tillis asks for evidence that Kennedy has kept any of the promises he’s made to Congress in the past.
Tillis points out that all he can get out of Kennedy’s HHS to a question about the economic impact of the budget bill that was passed amount to “word salad.”
Kennedy affirms his position that the COVID vaccines cause “serious harm” and “death”.
Folks, that’s as polite a way for a GOP Senator to state publicly that they don’t trust Kennedy as is possible.
Bernie Sanders (I):
This one takes a brief bit of preamble. When Senator Warren was questioning Kennedy about his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as Director of CDC, she asked Kennedy about Monarez’s public claim in a WSJ editorial that he demanded she sign off on what ACIP would recommend prior to them even meeting and insisted she fire a slew of senior staffers at CDC for who knows what reason. Kennedy told Warren that was not true and, when she asked what was the reason he fired her, got this in response.
That is obviously not a believable story. I mean, to make light of it, why would an untrustworthy person tell their boss they were not trustworthy instead of lying?
In any case, with that context, we move on to the takeaways from the back and forth with Bernie Sanders.
Kennedy reiterates his claim that Monarez lied about why she was fired and that, again, he did so because she told him she was not trustworthy.
Kennedy calls a net -$100 million investment in rural healthcare “the largest infusion of public money” into rural healthcare.
Kennedy affirms the COVID vaccines are the deadliest vaccines in history and that Trump should get a Nobel prize for helping develop them.
Kennedy launches into a conspiracy theory in which the largest NGOs and others that disagree with him have all been corrupted by the pharma industry.
Bill Cassidy (R):
Cassidy is the one many of us were waiting to see in this hearing, for multiple reasons. He’s a doctor, for instance. He was a pivotal vote in Kennedy’s confirmation hearings and extracted several promises about vaccines and policy during those hearings. And, finally, several other Republican Senators have pointed to him as the one they trust on healthcare and medicine issues.
Kennedy again affirms that Trump deserves a Nobel prize for Operation Warp Speed, despite saying those vaccines killed people. Cassidy then points out that Kennedy sued to limit access to COVID vaccines before his time in government.
Cassidy points out that the ACIP conflicts of interests data that Kennedy has claimed was wildly inaccurate. Kennedy attempts to argue the point, but fails.
Cassidy points out that several current ACIP members, which Kennedy hand-picked, serve as paid witnesses in vaccine injury trials and asks Kennedy if that is a conflict of interests. Kennedy responds it may be a bias, but not a financial conflict of interest, which makes zero sense.
Stick around for the end in which Cassidy shares some personal interactions he’s had with constituents demonstrating precisely how Kennedy’s policy actions have introduced a limitation of vaccine access and chaos and confusion among doctors as to what they can prescribe or not, which is exactly what we indicated would happen.
There was much, much more. More dissembling. More conspiracy theories. More lies. By any honest viewing of the hearing, it was a bipartisan verbal indication of no confidence in Kennedy, with some Senators choosing to be more polite about it than others. This was a more pointed and thorough takedown of Kennedy from both sides of the aisle than even I had hoped for.
So of course the White House is pretending this is all a partisan hitjob because Kennedy is so awesome.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Kennedy after he faced tense questioning by both Democratic and Republican senators.
The Health secretary “is taking flak because he’s over the target,” she said on X several hours after the hearing concluded. “The Trump Administration is addressing root causes of chronic disease, embracing transparency in government, and championing gold-standard science.”
Although she blamed Democrats for attacking “that commonsense effort,” Republican senators such as Cassidy and Barrasso had also expressed disapproval during the hearing with some of Kennedy’s most recent actions concerning vaccines.
As I said in a previous post, this is by no means the end of Kennedy’s tenure at HHS. But it just might be the beginning of that end. No amount of White House gaslighting is going to be able to counter rising illnesses, full hospitals, or explosive growth in the casket manufacturing business.
It’s a bit jarring to be reminded that it was only on June 10th that RFK Jr. decided to fire every member of ACIP, the CDC’s immunization advisory panel. Those 14 experts had a variety of backgrounds all related to and demonstrating industry experience specifically dealing with vaccination science and policy. They were replaced by an 8 member panel, handpicked by Kennedy and chockablock with vaccine deniers/skeptics and folks whose credentials don’t exactly match Kennedy’s description when he announced the new panel.
Now, it’s one thing when someone like me, who has been quite out in the open about my distaste for this administration and for Kennedy specifically, to talk about how bad this all is. And it is! ACIP recommendations effect everything from the availability and recommendations of vaccine schedules among doctors to whether and what coverage insurance companies are mandated to provide for them.
But when a staunch GOP Senator who voted to confirm Kennedy’s appointment as Secretary of HHS says that Kennedy’s choices for ACIP were so bad that he’d rather they not meet at all? Well, that should be indicative of just how absurd Kennedy’s behavior has become.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) called for the delay of this week’s meeting of a federal vaccine advisory panel handpicked by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, citing concerns about members’ lack of experience and potential bias towards vaccines.
“Wednesday’s meeting should not proceed with a relatively small panel, and no CDC Director in place to approve the panel’s recommendations,” Cassidy wrote in a post on X late Monday evening.
He noted that members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices “do not have significant experience studying microbiology, epidemiology or immunology,” and some may even have a “preconceived bias against” mRNA vaccines.
The Hill, which I generally like, has presented this quote in such a way that I don’t think it really provides the full impact of Cassidy’s statement. It almost sounds like just your run of the mill reaction from a politician on social media.
It’s not. This is Cassidy saying that Kennedy’s ACIP advisors are so ill-equipped to perform the role they’ve been assigned by RFK Jr. that they simply shouldn’t perform their jobs at all. Cassidy further couched his statements by saying that failing to at least delay the meeting, given how the panel is currently viewed, would create distrust of its recommendations. But that’s just saying the same thing again: the public would distrust ACIP’s recommendations because the ACIP panel members are largely completely unqualified for the role and some are actively hostile towards good public health policy.
ACIP is set to meet today and tomorrow. I somehow doubt that Kennedy’s arrogance, nevermind that of his boss, will allow him to delay the meeting as Cassidy requests. And, when that ends up being the case, the only remaining question is the one that we’ve been asking for some time: when is Congress going to put an end to RFK Jr.’s tenure at HHS?
It seems like every day this week a new bill has been introduced in Congress with the grandstanding politicians behind the bill insisting that it’s necessary to protect the children online. It seems like no elected official wants to be left behind on this particular moral panic train. The latest, from Senators Ed Markey and Bill Cassidy is being called COPPA 2.0 in that it updates the original Children’s Online Privacy Protect Act, which was passed in 1998.
And… look, COPPA has long had problems, many of which we’ve called out in the past. COPPA is the main reason why lots of parents teach their kids it’s okay to lie about your age, because many websites say you have to be over 13 to use them. That’s not because websites do a careful assessment of what age is the right age to use a website, but because COPPA applies stringent regulations to any website that targets those under the age of 13.
As danah boyd explained well over a decade ago, COPPA fails parents, educators, and (most importantly) the kids themselves.
While many parents do not believe that social network sites like Facebook and MySpace are suitable for young children, they often want their children to have access to other services that have age restrictions (email, instant messaging, video services, etc.). Often, parents cite that these tools enable children to connect with extended family; Skype is especially important to immigrant parents who have extended family outside of the US. Grandparents were most frequently cited as the reason why parents created accounts for their young children. Many parents will create accounts for children even before they are literate because the value of connecting children to family outweighs the age restriction. When parents encourage their children to use these services, they send a conflicting message that their kids eventually learn: ignore some age limitations but not others.
By middle school, communication tools and social network sites are quite popular among tweens who pressure their parents for permission to get access to accounts on these services because they want to communicate with their classmates, church friends, and friends who have moved away. Although parents in the wealthiest and most educated segments of society often forbid their children from signing up to social network sites until they turn 13, most parents support their children’s desires to acquire email and IM, precisely because of familial use. To join, tweens consistently lie about their age when asked to provide it. When I interviewed teens about who taught them to lie, the overwhelming answer was parents. I interviewed parents who consistently admitted to helping their children circumvent the age restriction by teaching them that they needed to choose a birth year that would make them over 13. Even in households where an older sibling or friend was the educator, parents knew their children had email and IM and social network sites accounts. Interestingly, in households where parents forbid Facebook but allow email, kids have started noting the hypocritical stance of their parents. That’s not a good outcome of this misinterpretation.
When I asked parents about how they felt about the age restrictions presented by social websites, parents had one of two responses. When referencing social network sites, parents stated that they felt that the restrictions were justified because younger children were too immature to handle the challenges of social network sites. Yet, when discussing sites and services that they did not believe were risky environments or that they felt were important for family communication, parents often felt as though the limitations were unnecessarily restrictive. Those who interpreted the restriction as a maturity rating did not understand why the sites required age confirmation. Some other parents felt as though the websites were trying to tell them how to parent. Some were particularly outraged by what they felt was a paternal attitude by websites, making statements like: “Who are they to tell me how to be a good parent?”
That was written 12 years ago. We’ve had a dozen years to make COPPA better, and nothing has been done.
So, instead, Senators Markey and Cassidy have decided to make COPPA worse. As laid out by the sponsors, the bill would do the following:
Build on COPPA by prohibiting internet companies from collecting personal information from users who are 13 to 16 years old without their consent;
Ban targeted advertising to children and teens;
Revise COPPA’s “actual knowledge” standard, covering platforms that are “reasonably likely to be used” by children and protecting users who are “reasonably likely to be” children or minors;
Create an “Eraser Button” for parents and kids by requiring companies to permit users to eliminate personal information from a child or teen when technologically feasible;
Establish a “Digital Marketing Bill of Rights for Teens” that limits the collection of personal information of teens; and
Establish a Youth Marketing and Privacy Division at the FTC.
So… again, out of the best intentions danger lies. This bill would require age verification, and all the assorted problems we’ve discussed about that. Which is kind of ironic, given that the bill is pitched as protecting privacy. But since it has special rules for different age groups, that’s going to require websites to determine how old their visitors are, which is privacy invasive, and potentially dangerous as well.
Getting rid of the “actual knowledge” standard raises some big 1st Amendment issues (you can’t be punished for speech you don’t know about), and switching to a “reasonably likely to be used by…” standard is massively destructive, especially when combined with the increase in age to 16. Again, we write about issues that impact high schoolers here on Techdirt, so we’d switch from a site that is currently not covered by COPPA, since we’re not targeting children under 13 to one that might now be covered, because some high schoolers may be “reasonably likely” to want to come to Techdirt to read about how their Senators are trying to destroy the internet and the ways in which they communicate with friends and family today.
Banning “targeted advertising” is one of those ideas that sounds good if you don’t know what you’re talking about, have no experience with internet advertising, and don’t know how anything works. Again, we already have the issue of age verification associated with this, but also, in many ways all advertising is targeted in some form or another. The bill purports to exclude “contextual” advertising from the definition of “targeted marketing,” but just the fact that they have to do that suggests they haven’t really thought this through and had to slot in this random exclusion at the end to avoid breaking basically everything.
The “consent” part also gets tricky, as we’ve discussed with various state bills that require parental consent for kids. Not all kids have a good relationship with their parents. Their parents may be estranged. Or a child may want to visit a website that the parent disagrees with but is important to that child. Perhaps a child is LGBTQ and wishes to find a welcoming community, while their parents disapprove.
There are so many problems with bills like this, and literally no evidence whatsoever that any of this will actually help or protect children. It’s all built on the moral panic that the internet is — full stop — bad for kids. Even as the evidence says that’s not true at all, and it’s actually quite useful for most kids.
For all the talk of internet companies “experimenting” on our children, why do we keep letting politicians do these experiments on children not backed up by any understanding or evidence?
Back when the whole TikTok hysteria was taking root, we noted how people were generally obsessing over the wrong things. Yes, there are concerns about what a Chinese company does with your data. But there was nothing TikTok was doing that was particularly unique in an adtech sector that’s massively complex, sees little meaningful regulatory oversight, isn’t big on the whole ethical behavior thing, operates in many countries with no real internet privacy laws, and is comprised of thousands of foreign and domestic app makers, data brokers, telecoms, tech giants, and others — all dashing toward a hugely profitable trough.
Last week, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers warned that this entire ecosystem is being exploited by governments around the world. There’s simply so much data being collected, and efforts to secure this data (if you hadn’t noticed from the steady parade of hacks, breaches, leaks, and avoidable fuck ups) aren’t particularly consistent:
“This information would be a goldmine for foreign intelligence services that could exploit it to inform and supercharge hacking, blackmail, and influence campaigns,” a letter signed by Senators Ron Wyden, Mark Warner, Kirsten Gillibrand, Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, and Bill Cassidy, reads. The lawmakers sent the letter last week to AT&T, Verizon, Google, Twitter, and a number of other companies that maintain advertisement platforms.”
The Senators seemed particularly concerned about “bidstream” data, which offers detailed insights into users and is collected by a long list of companies during the ad auction process, even if said companies don’t win the bid for that particular ad placement. Much like location, clickstream, and other data, bidstream data is then being sold to pretty much any idiot with a nickel, with nothing in the way of meaningful oversight, the lawmakers warned:
“Few Americans realize that some auction participants are siphoning off and storing ‘bidstream’ data to compile exhaustive dossiers about them. In turn, these dossiers are being openly sold to anyone with a credit card, including to hedge funds, political campaigns, and even to governments,” the letter continued.”
Granted as the steady parade of location data scandals routinely show, bidstream data is just a tiny part of this messy ecosystem. And the US government is itself part of the problem. Israeli surveillance companies Rayzone and Bsightful routinely sell this data. Companies like Venntel also sell this data, frequently to US government agencies like ICE. Experts warn that Congressional oversight into this arena is long overdue given the potential for widespread abuse:
“This is a deeply problematic practice when Western governments are abusing the data flows, and it becomes a national security emergency when these same global advertising companies are not vetting their own partners,” Zach Edwards, a researcher who has closely followed the supply chain of various sources of data, told Motherboard in an online chat.
“It’s long overdue for Congress to begin asking the largest tech companies in the world tough questions about their real-time-data-breach technology that underpins global advertising auctions and user data supply chains,” Edwards continued. “Every time a person loads a website or a mobile app, it’s likely that their data is being shared with at least dozens of companies, and when that user is interacting with an app or site with banner ads, typically several thousand companies could be receiving data about that visit in order to give those companies ‘the opportunity to bid to show ads to that user.'”
The US government’s love of ad data as a way to tap dance around warrants reduces any incentive for meaningful oversight of the sector, which is why “investigations” routinely end with few meaningful changes. When you have a universe of connected industries and governments all happily exploiting a single market and lobbying against meaningful change, it begins to make more sense why the US can’t even pass a basic internet privacy law. But it also shouldn’t be hard to see why obsessing exclusively about TikTok (which wound up being more about cronyism than privacy and security) was a waste of time in broader context.
