Vermont committee hears split views on H.342 privacy bill, business impacts and private lawsuits

Montpelier — The House Committee on Commerce & Economic Development heard hours of testimony March 13 on H.342, a proposal to let “covered persons” such as judges, prosecutors and law-enforcement officers request nondisclosure of home addresses and phone numbers from commercial data brokers.

The bill’s stated aim is to reduce doxxing, harassment and threats against public servants. Supporters told the committee the measure would provide a practical safeguard; business and industry witnesses warned it could disrupt routine commerce unless the draft is narrowed or clarified.

Garrett Rogers, senior operations counsel with First American Title Insurance Company, told the committee that his company supports redaction laws in principle but asked for technical changes to make compliance workable. Rogers said title insurers and many lenders rely on third-party “real property data” aggregators and that unclear or incomplete takedown requests and short compliance windows have caused major operational problems in other states.

“We support redaction laws,” Rogers said. “We are more than happy to shield judges and police officers. We just want it to work.” He described receiving tens of thousands of poorly specified requests under New Jersey’s law and urged the committee to require a Secretary of State form that includes name and primary and secondary addresses, to extend the compliance window to 30 days in some cases, and to allow a limited cure or grace period when firms are making good-faith efforts to comply.

Committee members pressed Rogers on how the bill would affect routine business-to-business transfers used for fraud prevention, credit checks and real-estate closings. Rogers and other witnesses said authorized disclosures for a transaction can address many scenarios, but they warned the bill’s current “disclosure” definition could unintentionally cover behind-the-scenes data exchanges and slow or block necessary flows of information.

Representatives on the committee raised specific process questions about consent and how an individual’s authorization would reach downstream vendors, and whether firms that serve both consumer-facing and business customers should be treated differently.

Privacy and enforcement were the other main fault lines. Lauren Schultz, a privacy scholar at Florida State University, urged lawmakers to view private enforcement and public enforcement as complementary. “Rights aren’t real” without remedies, she said, arguing that private rights of action can pressure both industry and public enforcers to make laws effective and that narrowly tailored private remedies are a common approach across other areas of law.

Advocates who helped implement New Jersey’s Daniel’s Law described why private enforcement mattered in practice. Matt Adkisson, founder of the Atlas Data Privacy Organization, said the law helped many at-risk public servants but that compliance in New Jersey was spotty. He described being told by some data brokers that takedown notices were “nuisance emails” and said litigation was pursued after firms refused to remove or suppress home contact data. “This bill is not about deleting data. It is just about nondisclosure and redaction. Period,” Adkisson said, asking the committee to preserve a private right of action to ensure enforcement.

Committee members repeatedly returned to tradeoffs between protecting individuals and preserving business operations. Some members proposed alternatives such as limiting the bill to consumer-facing, online data or creating safe-harbor language, a notice-and-cure process, or stronger Attorney General authority in place of a private right of action.

The committee did not vote on the bill during the hearing. Members said they will consult legislative counsel and continue drafting, including clarifying whether the bill targets only public-facing, searchable online databases or broader business-to-business data flows used for credit checks, fraud prevention, and other transaction processing. The committee scheduled further discussion for its next meeting.

Quotes used in this report come from witness testimony at the March 13, 2025, House Committee on Commerce & Economic Development hearing on H.342.