Layne Gregory lives in Falmouth.

Maine’s Legislature failed to enact LD 1822, the Maine Online Data Privacy Act — and with it, failed every Mainer whose personal data is being harvested, bought and sold without their meaningful consent.

Personal data is any information that can be reasonably linked to you as an individual — your browsing activity, your location and other details that companies quietly collect to build profiles on who you are and where you go. The bill is dead, at least for now. 

The bill would have only allowed companies to collect the personal information they actually need to provide a specific service or product, rather than placing the burden on consumers to opt out of data sharing. It would also have prohibited the use of sensitive data — such as a person’s race, ethnicity or health conditions — and the data of minors.

Sensitive data goes further still: it includes your citizenship status, genetic information (i.e., information about you and your family’s health history that can be used by insurers, employers and the federal government), fingerprints, precise geolocation and other details that, in the wrong hands, can be used to discriminate, surveil or harm. That’s basic human dignity in the digital age.

But dignity, it turns out, is bad for business. At least that’s what Maine’s corporate lobby would have us believe.

The Maine State Chamber of Commerce, the Retail Association of Maine, HospitalityMaine, and the National Federation of Independent Business in Maine lobbied hard against the bill. This was no spontaneous uprising of concerned small business owners. LD 1822 was the top lobbied bill of last year, following patterns of outsized efforts to influence the issue in 2024, all of which mirror sizable lobbying from Big Tech companies on these types of measures across the country. This was a coordinated campaign to protect the right of corporations to keep treating Maine people as data products.

The faces at a press conference in Portland told the story plainly. Patrick Woodcock, CEO of the Maine State Chamber of Commerce, claimed the bill would put Maine “at a severe competitive disadvantage” and make it “extremely challenging to identify that next customer.” Translation: your location data, your health history, your browsing habits — those belong to whoever can pay for them, and any interference is an attack on commerce.

Also at that podium: Adam Goldberg, CEO of the Maine Mariners, who said the legislation threatens his team’s marketing practices because its finances are “on a knife’s edge every season.” Representatives from Sea Bags, Three Dollar Deweys and the Maine State Music Theatre appeared alongside him. Dirk Gouwens, executive director of the Ski Maine Association, warned that limiting targeted advertising would put Maine ski areas at a “huge disadvantage” compared to competitors in New Hampshire and Vermont. HospitalityMaine ran an ad campaign claiming the law would mean “lights out for Maine’s tourism industry.”

A theater. A hockey team. A ski association. A bar. All of them, somehow, requiring access to your most intimate personal data to function. This is the argument that carried the day in Augusta — and it should embarrass every lawmaker who bought it.

The stakes could not be higher. The ACLU of Maine urged lawmakers to pass the bill, warning that detailed personal data can be used to track people at protests, political rallies, places of worship and family planning clinics. In the current political climate — with federal privacy protections eroding and surveillance capabilities expanding — that is not hypothetical. It is happening to Americans right now.

After the sizable show of business opposition, five Democrats joined Republicans in rejecting the proposal. Those votes will be remembered. When a Mainer’s sensitive health data ends up in the hands of an insurer, or a teenager’s browsing history is sold to the highest bidder, the businesses that stood at that Portland podium — and the legislators who listened to them — will own the consequences.

Here is a link to find out how your representative voted: https://legiscan.com/ME/rollcall/LD1822/id/1672548Rep. 

Rep. Amy Kuhn spent more than six years building toward this moment. She was right. The businesses that killed her bill were wrong — not just strategically, but morally. Maine deserves better.