UPDATE: Washington says NO! to bad Washington State Privacy Legislation (SB 6281)

UPDATE: 6281 DOES NOT PASS! THANKS EVERYBODY!!!!

Here’s House ITED Committee Ranking Member Norma Smith’s statement. This is a huge victory! Thanks to the Tech Fairness Coalition for leading the resistance, ACLU Washington, all the activists and advocates across the state and nationally who got involved, and the state legislators on both sides of the aisle who had the courage to vote NO in the teeth of the most intense lobbying by the tech industry Olympia has ever experienced!

The rest of this post is the action alert we sent out early today. Thanks again to everybody who contacted their legislators!

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The Washington Legislature is voting TODAY on a very bad privacy bill, SB 6281 (the so-called “Washington Privacy Act”). Consumer and privacy organizations have pointed out many problems with this bill — it is actually WORSE in some ways than the disastrously-bad version the Senate passed a few weeks ago.

We still haven’t even seen the final version — it seems like the tech industry is going to try to sneak something through without any real chance for legislators to read and understand it. But we can’t wait.

So please contact your state legislators ASAP — even if you’ve already sent feedback on this bill. The message:

VOTE NO on SB 6281. Weak legislation riddled with loopholes does not protect us. We need strong privacy legislation, not window dressing.

There are multiple ways to contact your legislators.

• One easy way to do this is to call the Legislative Hotline at 1–800–562–6000 (TTY for Hearing Impaired 1–800–635–9993). Give your name and address, so they know who your state legislators are. Tell them the first bill number (SB 6281), and that you OPPOSE the legislation. When they ask for a comment, you can just use the message above “Unenforceable legislation riddled with loopholes does not protect us. We need strong privacy legislation.”
• https://app.leg.wa.gov/PBC/Bill/6281 is also easy! Type in your address, then click Verify District. Then enter your contact information, click on Oppose, cut-and-paste the comment, and click on Send.
• Email works too. Email addresses are available here, and if you’re not sure who your legislators are, the District Finder lets you look them up. Make sure the subject says OPPOSE SB 6281.
• You can also use resistbot’s State Legislation functionality.

And one more request: please help get the word out about this! This is legislation that affects all of us, and large advertising and tech companies are spending a lot of money to try to get it passed. So please share this post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, email, and any other way you can think of! You can use the buttons on the right near the top of the post, or just cut-and-paste the link.

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Image originally from Coaching 4 Today’s Leaders