Digital-Rights and Platform-Power Regulation

The continuing intensification of rules governing data protection, privacy, and dominant-platform conduct (e.g. GDPR-style data laws, digital-markets/gatekeeper rules). A regulatory force shaping how safely and fairly citizens experience the digital sphere.

What is documented

Digital-rights regulation becomes concrete when agencies impose limits on collection, retention, sale and monetization of personal information. Under Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission used both rulemaking and enforcement. In January 2025 the FTC finalized changes to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule. The changes require separate parental opt-in for disclosures to third parties for targeted advertising, tighten data-retention rules, expand covered identifiers and increase transparency obligations for approved safe-harbor programs. The Commission said it had reviewed nearly 300 comments before finalizing the changes.

The agency also pursued data brokers. In January 2024, its proposed InMarket order prohibited sale or licensing of precise location data after allegations that consumers were not adequately informed or asked for consent. In December 2024, the FTC moved against Mobilewalla over the collection and sale of sensitive location information, including data that could reveal visits to medical facilities and other intimate locations. A separate action against Gravy Analytics and Venntel alleged sale and use of sensitive location data tied to health care, religion, political activity and other protected contexts. These cases matter because digital surveillance is not only an advertising issue: location trails can expose protesters, patients, worshippers, service members and workers to discrimination, intimidation or physical danger.

Who moves this driver

Lina Khan is a relevant public decision-maker because she chaired the Commission during these votes and described unchecked surveillance as a consumer-protection problem. The Commission’s other members also voted, sometimes with dissents, and agency staff investigated and litigated the cases. Data brokers and platforms are equally central because the regulatory response follows their collection and commercialization practices. Courts remain an external constraint on how far the FTC can extend its statutory authority.

The criticism-first frame therefore applies in both directions. Companies that monetize sensitive data can externalize privacy and safety risks onto people who did not meaningfully consent. Regulators can reduce those risks, but they also must act within legal authority and provide rules clear enough for legitimate services, research and advertising markets to comply.

Welfare pathways

The first meter is Alternative sources of information index. Surveillance of political activity and identity can chill participation and information seeking; restrictions on unauthorized sensitive-data trading can therefore support a more usable information environment, although the index is broader than privacy enforcement. A broader civic-rights pathway runs through Voice and accountability gap. Protecting protesters and politically active people from covert location profiling can reduce a rights-related barrier to participation. Because this is a zero-is-norm gap, a beneficial effect means the gap value falls.

What is uncertain

FTC orders bind named firms and do not by themselves eliminate the wider data-broker market. COPPA covers children and specific operators rather than every digital service. Enforcement outcomes, compliance quality, court review and future Commission priorities can all change practical protection. There is also no defensible basis for assigning a national voice-and-accountability improvement directly to one consent order. The supported claim is that these actions reduce specific surveillance practices that can burden privacy, speech and association; translation into broad governance indicators is plausible but indirect and should remain below high confidence.