The U.S. Department of Transportation announced its first industry-wide review of the data privacy and security policies of the largest U.S. airlines.
The Department of Transportation said in a press release Thursday that the review will examine whether the US airline giants are adequately protecting their customers’ personal information and whether the airlines are “monetizing or sharing that data in an unfair or deceptive manner with third parties.”
The letters to airline executives will include questions about how airlines collect and handle personal passenger information, monetize customer data through targeted advertising, and how employees and contractors are trained to handle customer information. passengers.
Those airlines include Allegiant, Alaska, American, Delta, Frontier, Hawaiian, JetBlue, Southwest, Spirit and United.
The department, which oversees U.S. government policy on all transportation-related matters, said it would investigate and take enforcement action as it uncovered evidence of problematic practices.
US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the review aims to “ensure that airlines are good stewards of sensitive passenger data.”
The DOT did not say what specifically prompted the review, but that the action was part of the U.S. government’s “broader push to protect consumer privacy across the economy.”
In recent months, the US Federal Trade Commission, which regulates consumer data privacy issues, has banned data brokers and other companies from sharing users’ sensitive location and browsing data with others, ordered companies affected by data breaches to review your security practicesand pledged to strengthen the federal law known as COPPA which prevents companies from obtaining data on children under 13 years of age.
The DOT said the FTC “is also exploring rules to more broadly combat harms from surveillance and poor data security.”
Transportation Secretary Buttigieg said the DOT privacy review will be conducted with the expertise and collaboration of Sen. Ron Wyden, a ranking Democrat who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Wyden has raised alarms about the sharing and sale of sensitive US consumer data to data brokers: companies that collect and resell people’s personal data, such as precise location data, often derived from their phones and computers.
In recent months, Wyden has warned that data brokers are selling access to Americans’ personal information, which can identify which websites they visit and the places they travel to. Wyden also warned that U.S. intelligence agencies can (and have) purchased commercially available information about Americans from data brokers, which the intelligence community maintains is They do not need to obtain a search warrant to get data they can buy.
In his comments, Wyden said: “Because consumers will often never know that their personal data was misused or sold to shady data brokers, effective privacy regulation cannot rely on consumer complaints to identify corporate abuses. “.