Navigating the United States Legislative Landscape on Voice Privacy: Existing Laws, Proposed Bills, Protection for Children, and Synthetic Data for AI

TL;DR

This paper reviews U.S. privacy legislation related to voice data, children's data, and synthetic data, highlighting current laws, proposed bills, and regulatory considerations for AI development.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of U.S. privacy laws concerning voice data and synthetic data, including legislative gaps and regulatory challenges.

Findings

Voice data is explicitly addressed in U.S. privacy laws.

Synthetic data is emerging as a regulatory consideration for AI.

Proposed bills aim to enhance privacy protections for children.

Abstract

Privacy is a hot topic for policymakers across the globe, including the United States. Evolving advances in AI and emerging concerns about the misuse of personal data have pushed policymakers to draft legislation on trustworthy AI and privacy protection for its citizens. This paper presents the state of the privacy legislation at the U.S. Congress and outlines how voice data is considered as part of the legislation definition. This paper also reviews additional privacy protection for children. This paper presents a holistic review of enacted and proposed privacy laws, and consideration for voice data, including guidelines for processing children's data, in those laws across the fifty U.S. states. As a groundbreaking alternative to actual human data, ethically generated synthetic data allows much flexibility to keep AI innovation in progress. Given the consideration of synthetic data in AI legislation by policymakers to be relatively new, as compared to that of privacy laws, this paper reviews regulatory considerations for synthetic data.