1. United States
2. Letter

Dear Mr. President, I am writing to urge decisive federal action on data privacy, commercial surveillance, and biometric data collection—areas where current law has failed to protect the American public. Americans now live inside an economy that treats personal data as an extractive resource. Our locations, movements, purchases, vehicles, faces, associations, and inferred traits are continuously collected, aggregated, analyzed, and sold—often without meaningful consent or transparency. This data is used to set prices, raise insurance premiums, deny coverage, determine credit and employment eligibility, and enable pervasive surveillance. Consumers receive no financial benefit from this system. We are not compensated for our data. Instead, we bear the economic and civil costs: surveillance pricing, discriminatory profiling, fraud risk, chilling of speech and association, and loss of autonomy in daily life. Current privacy frameworks rely on opt-out mechanisms that place an unreasonable burden on individuals after harm has already occurred. California’s DELETE Act and DROP platform exist because requiring people to identify and repeatedly contact hundreds of data brokers is unrealistic. These tools acknowledge failure; they do not prevent harm. The expansion of facial recognition, license-plate tracking, and biometric surveillance has made anonymity in public life effectively impossible. These technologies are already associated with documented misuse, including stalking by officials, inappropriate searches, abortion-related investigations, and wrongful arrests caused by facial recognition errors. When government agencies purchase commercial surveillance data, constitutional safeguards are often bypassed entirely. Artificial intelligence now compounds these harms. Automated systems infer sensitive traits, assign risk scores, and make eligibility decisions at scale—while accountability disappears. When errors occur, responsibility is deflected with claims that “the algorithm did it,” leaving individuals without explanation, appeal, or remedy. This is not a technological inevitability. It is a policy choice. I respectfully urge your administration to support comprehensive federal data privacy legislation that includes: - Opt-in consent as the default for data collection and sharing - Strict limits on the sale of biometric, location, and behavioral data - Accountability, transparency, and appeal rights for automated decision systems - Warrant requirements for government acquisition of commercial surveillance data - Strong enforcement mechanisms and a private right of action Privacy is not nostalgia. It is economic fairness, civil liberty, and democratic stability. Americans should not have to surrender their autonomy in order to participate in modern society. I ask that your administration treat this issue with the urgency it demands and work with Congress to establish a federal privacy framework that protects people before harm occurs—not after. Respectfully,