Legislative counsel walks Senate Institutions through House'amendment to S71, highlighting definition, threshold and exemption changes

Rick Sele, legislative counsel with the Office of Legislative Counsel, told the Senate Institutions committee on May 27 that House Commerce released an amendment to S71 about an hour before the meeting and that he would compare draft 5.2 with the version the Senate passed last year.

The presentation traced four classes of differences: formatting and readability edits; Connecticut's 2025 updates carried into the House text; House Commerce'specific edits (largely to definitions); and alignment with Vermont's age-appropriate design code. "You should have either on your committee web page or in front of you the S71 House proposal amendment," Sele said as he began the walkthrough.

House draft 5.2 reduces the bill's coverage threshold. The Senate-passed text applied to controllers processing the data of at least 100,000 consumers; House Commerce lowers that floor to 35,000. The House draft also creates alternate triggers: collecting the sensitive data of 3,000 consumers or selling the personal data of 3,000 consumers would make a controller subject to the law, Sele said.

The House version expands and clarifies definitions that determine which information is "sensitive" and therefore subject to stricter rules. Sele pointed to new explicit inclusions for biometric identifiers (iris, fingerprint scans), genetic information and neural data, and said several definitions were aligned to Connecticut 2025 and Vermont's Kids Code drafting conventions.

A single definition proved pivotal for rights and obligations: "publicly available information." Under the House draft, certain uses'for example, information made available for sale'are narrower in scope and do not automatically render material exempt from deletion or opt-out rights. "This is a very important definition because it is publicly available. It's not personal data and therefore notably not regulated by this act," Sele explained, noting the draft narrows some of the exclusions the Senate had used.

Exemptions also differ markedly. The presenter said the House list is longer and more prescriptive: it enumerates government entities, health-care providers and research exemptions, consumer-reporting agency activities, education records covered by FERPA, and other sectoral carve-outs. In some cases the House uses "instrumentality of the state" language rather than a blanket institution-of-higher-education exemption, which could leave some private colleges outside the exemption unless another one applies.

Consumer rights mirror many Connecticut 2025 updates the House carried into draft 5.2. Those include confirmation and access obligations that cover inferences used for profiling, correction and deletion rights, and a new requirement that controllers provide particularized notices rather than disclose raw sensitive values when responding to access requests.

The House draft broadens who may act for a consumer: it permits an authorized agent to exercise the full suite of rights on a consumer's behalf. Sele noted the language is slightly confusing in places, but functionally it allows businesses or other designated agents to submit and pursue opt-outs and access requests for paying clients.

Connecticut'style impact-assessment requirements are in the House text for profiling and automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects. Controllers that engage in such profiling must document purpose, benefits, risk analysis and mitigation steps; the Attorney General may request those assessments during investigations.

On enforcement and timing, Sele said the House retains a cure period and similar enforcement placement under consumer-protection statutes. The Attorney General would issue reports on violations and whether they resulted in enforcement actions; the House draft instructs the AG to publish counts and cure-related outcomes. The amendment sets the act's effective date as Jan. 1, 2028, with a 60-day cure period where the AG deems a violation curable.

Representative Mark, who joined the discussion after the presentation, said the process produced compromises. "I can tell you that there is no one around my table that is completely happy with this bill," he said, adding the intention is to put a base in statute and improve it over time through stakeholder feedback and subsequent sessions.

The committee conducted an informal straw poll about concurring with the House amendment by raising hands; members did not record a formal roll-call vote in the transcript. The walkthrough ended after a brief question period and administrative remarks. The bill, as amended in the House draft presented, would take effect Jan. 1, 2028, if enacted as shown.

Next steps: committee members and staff signaled further review and opportunities to flag technical drafting concerns before the January 2028 effective date.