Fort Collins lawmaker champions first-in-the-nation biological data privacy bill

A Fort Collins legislator’s bipartisan bill that aims to further protect biological data as technology progresses has been signed into law.

Protect Privacy of Biological Data, HB24-1058, was signed into law Wednesday by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis after passing unanimously in the Colorado Senate in March.

The bipartisan bill concerns the protection of privacy regarding biological data and will expand the scope of the Colorado Privacy Act.

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In 2021, the General Assembly enacted Senate Bill 21-190, which established the Colorado Privacy Act Colorado Consumer Protection Act. That act “protects the privacy of individuals’ personal data by establishing certain requirements for entities that process personal data. The privacy act also describes certain rights that consumers may exercise regarding the processing of their personal data” and “includes additional protections for sensitive data.”

Now, the definition sensitive data is expanded to include biological data. Biological data is defined in the bill as “data generated by the technological processing, measurement, or analysis of an individual’s biological, genetic, biochemical, physiological, or neural properties, compositions, or activities or of an individual’s body or bodily functions, which data is used or intended to be used, singly or in combination with other personal data, for identification purposes. Biological data includes neural data, which is information that is generated by the measurement of the activity of an individual’s central or peripheral nervous systems and that can be processed by or with the assistance of a device.”

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Fort Collins Democratic Rep. Cathy Kipp said that after she learned more from neurologists at the Neuro Rights Foundation, she wanted to utilize the Colorado Privacy Act to cover growing neurotechnology as well.

“There are about 30 companies out there that are selling the information and that might not sound too scary, but as we learn more about people through reading brain waves, it would be appropriate to add this information into the Colorado Privacy Act,” Kipp said.

Kipp said “this particular bill is the first-in-the-nation” and the only other “country to make legal amendments to protect neuro-biological data is Chile.”

“In 10 years from now, there will be even more neurotechnology, so this is a frontier on saving privacy when that happens,” she said.