Please vote in favor of SB85. This bill will help protect minors (and adults!) from dangerous online practices by allowing people, not companies, to own their photos, contacts, and online records. We continue to see addictive behavior patterns from teens on social media, but they often feel trapped to stay on these apps precisely because the company, not the individual, has full control over the data. Social media companies who do not support SB85 are not supporting healthy childhood development. Their concerns surrounding this bill should be met with raised eyebrow. Please vote in favor of SB85 so that Virginia's kids can grow up safe, healthy, and happy, not trapped by BigTech.

Dear Chair Ebbin and members of the committee, The Technology Policy Project at Reason Foundation provides pro bono consulting to public officials and stakeholders to help them design and implement technology policy reforms regarding the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies, digital free speech, data security, child online safety, and tech industry competition policy. Our team brings practical, market-oriented strategies to help foster innovation, competition, and consumer choice through technology policies that work. We share the sponsor's goal of empowering users to control and delete their data, but Senate Bill 85, in its current state, would ultimately hinder the legislature’s ability to achieve that goal. The core of our concerns centers around the problematic interoperability requirements, which carry privacy and cybersecurity risks. Proponents of interoperability mandates, such as the one outlined in SB 85, often overemphasize the ability for companies to interoperate within a closed ecosystem of products and services. Indeed, there is a driving market incentive to make services cross-functional online. But when this kind of interoperation occurs, it is done between parties with heightened data protection practices and protocols. What this bill contemplates, on the other hand, is forcing companies to interoperate with anyone regardless of the receiving party’s data protection standards. Such a mandate would disregard the improvements made in data privacy and cyber threat minimization and significantly undermine a company’s ability to safeguard user data. When user data is transmitted, the privacy and security protections from the originating platform cannot be guaranteed to be as stringent on the receiving platform. Because companies would be required to comply with interoperability requests, even if they find the third-party platform’s data protection protocols insufficient, this bill would open the door for a new generation of online hacks and cybercrime. These concerns are compounded by SB 85’s application to certain AI “model operators” and “contextual data.” Contextual data can include prompts, chat histories, uploaded files, preferences, metadata and model generated or inferred data linked to a user’s interactions. This information is often far more sensitive than typical social media exports and more likely to include third-party information. Requiring third-party accessible interoperability interfaces for this category of data increases the attack surface and heightens privacy and security risks. Finally, the bill specifies that the other users’ data transmitted in response to a request will not include data marked as private. However, the transmission would still include data about the user’s connections, such as other people’s accounts or profiles, and the user's interactions with those people’s posts. For these reasons, we urge this committee to reject the data interoperability mandates outlined in SB 85. Thank you for the opportunity to submit this written testimony, and we welcome the opportunity to advise the legislature on this subject in the future. Sincerely, Nicole Shekhovtsova (nicole.shekhovtsova@reason.org) Caden Rosenbaum (caden.rosenbaum@reason.org)

The power hungry Spanberger, Democrats, and Socialists in the Virginia General Assembly are not doing their job to protect Virginia America citizens from dangerous criminals! This is your first priority as a politicians, but you are not. The leftists continue to promote murders and the mobs instead of the police, law abiding people. Indoctrination of our children to become propagandists protesters is morally wrong and you should be ashamed of yourselves. Shame on you all. Data centers are not the way to go and human lives will be lost. These are dark times because the left’s cruelty. Comments in the link. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/dhs-blasts-spanberger-on-potential-release-of-illegal-migrant-with-30-arrests-currently-charged-with-murder/ar-AA1Xsk8U

I oppose data centers that are costly for everyone in our state. Many of us rather have fresh water and farm land than use up technology development. Democrats and socialists are forcing us to pay more taxes so they can redistribute it to other people and have more government subsidies. These policies are wasteful and not affordable policies. Spanberger and the majority of democrats do not care about putting Virginia citizens first. We don’t want to be California, Illinois, or any socialist state.