Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Mary Gay Scanlon are introducing an updated version of the Health and Location Data Protection Act that explicitly prohibits selling personal health and location data to third parties, including artificial intelligence companies. The legislation targets a specific risk where users share sensitive medical history or precise whereabouts with chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude, fearing that this information could be harvested and sold to data brokers. The original bill from June 2022 focused on stopping brokers from collecting such data directly, but the new draft expands the ban to cover all entities attempting to trade this information. This shift addresses the unique privacy architecture of generative AI, which often trains models on user prompts without clear consent mechanisms. By classifying AI developers alongside traditional data aggregators, the law seeks to close a regulatory gap where personal conversations with automated systems were previously unregulated.
The practical outcome is a stricter legal framework that forces technology firms to obtain explicit permission before monetising user inputs related to health or movement. This change aims to prevent the creation of comprehensive profiles based on private medical disclosures made during casual interactions with software tools.
* Applies to both direct collection and secondary sales to brokers
* Covers data generated specifically through AI chatbot interactions
* Requires explicit user consent for any commercial use of sensitive inputs
