What We’re Reading
Bipartisan data security breakthrough (The Hill, April 9, 2024)
On Sunday evening, the House and Senate Commerce committee chairs revealed a draft of the long-awaited bipartisan data privacy bill after years of failed efforts to pass a comprehensive privacy bill on the federal level. This draft bill requires companies to disclose how they use consumer data and provide more rights to consumers over how the data is used. Currently, 15 states have signed comprehensive data privacy laws. This federal draft bill aims to preempt state law, which Republicans have been endorsing, while Democrats have been pushing for the right for consumers to seek financial damages.
“A federal data privacy law must do two things: it must make privacy a consumer right, and it must give consumers the ability to enforce that right,” Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said in a statement. “This bipartisan agreement is the protections Americans deserve in the Information Age.”
House Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) stated that the bill is “the best opportunity we’ve had in decades to establish a national data privacy and security standard that gives people the right to control their personal information.”
Tesla settles with Apple engineer’s family who said Autopilot caused his fatal crash (CNN Business, April 8, 2024)
Facing a potentially large monetary judgment and significant reputational damage as it continues to promote FSD, Tesla opted to settle a high-profile case that was expected to focus on Tesla’s controversial driver-assistance technology during a wrongful death trial which was set to commence this week. The lawsuit arose from a 2018 car crash that killed an Apple engineer after his Model X, operating on Autopilot, swerved off a highway near San Francisco.
Although the terms of the settlement were not disclosed, Tesla’s willingness to resolve such a highly publicized case involving Autopilot marks a stark departure from its prior steadfast decision to fully litigate other similar claims across the country. “It is striking to me that Tesla decided to go this far publicly and then settle,” Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina with expertise in autonomous vehicle law told Reuters. “What this does do, though, is it says to other attorneys, we might settle. We might not always fight it. That is the signal.”
Gov. Andy Beshear Vetoes Self-Driving Vehicles Bill (Governing, April 8, 2024)
Kentucky Governor, Andy Beshear, vetoed House Bill 7 last Friday, making it the second time he has vetoed an autonomous vehicle bill. Last year he vetoed a similar bill, House Bill 135, that aimed to establish a regulatory framework for the operation of fully autonomous vehicles on public highways.
House Bill 7 included safety precautions such as a trial period for semi-truck and other vehicles weighing more than 62,000 pounds, a human driver on board for two years after the effective date of the bill, the same legal requirements as traditional vehicles, and a safety plan submitted to the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet and the Kentucky State Police.
Since the legislature passed the bill right before going into the veto-break period, they still have time to override the veto. Veto overrides require a majority vote from both chambers of the state legislature. We will have to wait and see what the outcome will be as the bill overwhelmingly passed the House and narrowly passed the Senate.