House Privacy Work Continues Amid Shutdown, Lawyer Tells ANA
CHICAGO -- Work in the House on a national privacy bill has continued even during the government shutdown, Venable’s Michael Signorelli said during a panel Tuesday at the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) ad law conference. But with a year to go until the 2026 midterm elections, timing could be a problem, the privacy and advertising attorney said. “The calendar is no one’s friend right now.”
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Meanwhile, Signorelli said to expect more state regulation in 2026.
A House Commerce Committee Republican working group started developing privacy legislation in early 2025 (see 2502140044). However, the House hasn't held a session during a shutdown that’s now the longest in history. A Republican staffer on Wednesday responded to discussion about a potential forthcoming report based on the working group's request for information: "We have not alluded to releasing a report on the RFI of our privacy working group."
ANA understands that "House Republicans' privacy working group has been diligently working on this process since it launched early this year, and we believe that work has continued over recent weeks, but we don't know the timeline for future meetings or action," Chris Oswald, the association's executive vice president of government relations, said in a statement emailed to Privacy Daily.
Signorelli said on the panel that he “met with staff last week” and heard the work on privacy is “moving ahead.” While no one knows when Congress will return to regular business, the lawyer said the hope is that they will “be back before Thanksgiving [to] move forward.”
“Presuming that they do come back in the next couple of weeks, the number-one agenda item coming out of [House Commerce] is kids safety and privacy,” but a comprehensive privacy bill is probably next, said Signorelli. The group has “been working on it diligently through the summer, the fall,” and during the shutdown.
But time remains a key question for a national privacy bill. “There are not a lot of legislative days left, so we might be looking at” Q1 2026, “hopefully January of next year, for this to work through regular order, to get to the floor and over to the Senate,” Signorelli said. “And then it's in the hands of the Senate.”
The working group is eyeing a definition of targeted advertising preferred by advertisers, Signorelli told the ANA audience. So far, 19 of 20 states with comprehensive privacy laws have adopted the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) “standard for what it means to engage in targeted advertising and what the appropriate safeguards and data protection requirements are around that.” California is the outlier.
Congress also failed to adopt the DAA standard in its previous two sweeping privacy proposals, “and not surprisingly, both legislative vehicles collapsed,” he said. “And I do know, talking with staff on the Hill right now, that there's a real strong interest to avoid that a third time, and [in] looking to the DAA standard as a way of setting what would be responsible, ethical advertising at a federal level.”
While Congress decides what to do, Signorelli predicted “more regulation” and “tighter restrictions” from states in 2026. That could include more states following California in expanding the definition of a data broker, he added.
“Now in California, brand marketers are data brokers if they collect data outside of the first-party context. I don't know what first-party context is, but if you collect data where the consumer may not have known that you were collecting data … you're now a data broker required to register” with the state and integrate with California’s upcoming accessible data-deletion mechanism, known as the Delete Request and Opt-Out Platform (DROP).
“I expect that we'll see more states move to adopt that approach,” said the lawyer, adding that Connecticut and Massachusetts already have signaled this. Connecticut Sen. James Maroney (D) said last month that next year he would propose legislation like the California Delete Act and create a data broker registry (see 2510220015).
“It would not be a good policy result if there's no data in our economy,” added Signorelli. “It's vitally critical to our economy that data is available and making it so easy for it to be removed will have ripple effects in our economy … Until we have a federal law that preempts what's happening [in the] states, we're going to continue to see this track toward less access to data by the business community.”