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Last week, President Trump signed an executive order [ [link removed] ] preventing states from enforcing their own AI laws. This major favor to Big Tech, comes as tech accountability advocates have looked to the states to create guardrails around the tech industry. Big Tech titans have noticed that state lawmakers have the potential to reign them in. Meta recently launched [ [link removed] ]a new super PAC with the goal of electing state lawmakers that wouldn’t push AI oversight, and tech companies and allied businesses have been deploying lobbyists [ [link removed] ] in a major spending blitz in statehouses across the country.
I spoke with Vermont Representative Monique Priestly [ [link removed] ], a strong champion for tech accountability, about what Big Tech is up to in statehouses and how advocates are fighting for protections.
Meaghan: What do we need to know about how Big Tech lobbies in statehouses?
Rep. Priestly: The White House is having cocktail parties for tech executives, but a lot of tech lobbying is happening on the state level. Every moment for our daily lives is somehow affected by or manipulated by tech. So, when data privacy bills or AI bills are being considered, we don’t just see the companies like Google, Amazon, Meta get involved, we also see big pharmaceutical companies, big banks, insurance, auto tech, all these industries that rely on data to serve ads. It’s just like what you see with lobbying in different sectors. We have a lot of local contract lobbyists on the ground, and just about all of their clients have a stake in data, because they’re making money from our data.
The Chamber of Commerce is a really powerful scary piece of this. Big Tech companies become members of different trade associations, both nationally and in states. There’s the US Chamber of Commerce and state Chambers of Commerce, too. As far as I understand, Google is a member of most or all state Chambers of Commerce, and they’re coordinating and driving a lot of what local businesses hear. I never realized, until I was a legislator, how much lobbying the Chambers do and how conservative the organization is.
You have all these local businesses that join the Chamber because they want to support the state economy, and they don’t pay attention or realize what’s going on in the statehouse or how the Chamber is representing them. They may get an email that says, “This data privacy bill is going to kill your business. You’re all going to go out of business. The economy is going to die. Amazon and Facebook and Google are never going to let you advertise for them again, and they’re going to leave Vermont.” Maybe I’m describing that with a little bit of hyperbole, but not much. And then state legislators don’t want to be in the position of killing local businesses, but the messaging is coming from these bigger business groups orchestrating opposition.
Meaghan: How do you think about this tech lobbying as a corruption issue?
Rep. Priestly: Big corporations started realizing how important state legislatures are, and they immediately switched their attention to the states where it’s cheaper to buy seats, buy ads. It’s easier to get lobbyists in front of legislators. The big thing right now is that corporations have all of the power. State legislators often don’t have staff. We’re often getting minimal pay and trying to work other jobs, traveling back and forth to family. Meanwhile, just as a concrete example, $2 million was spent [by businesses] fighting Maine’s privacy bill last year.
I don’t think everyday people realize how much lobbyists have more power than elected officials. There’s more of them. They’re getting paid to dedicate their lives full-time to fighting, whereas there are only a few states where there are full-time legislators. In most states, as a state legislator, there’s this very limited window of time during the year when you have to learn and cram in as much policy as you can. Meanwhile, corporations can just spend unlimited amounts to undermine everything you’re doing. So, the corporations are the ones driving our laws.
We’ve been trying to pass a consumer data privacy law that would allow individuals to have rights about how and when their data is collected and how the data is used. There are data brokers, thousands of companies around the world, that are constantly buying and selling our data. Some will have a seemingly legitimate business purpose for doing that, like monitoring fraud, but then they might have a second arm that sells people’s addresses and so forth. So, we’re trying to wrangle that broken industry.
What I’ve realized is the real issue is advertising technology. Related to advertising, the Chamber of Commerce will tell make this argument to lawmakers that goes, “Joe’s Diner is going to go out of business without Facebook and Google ads,” but what they don’t tell anybody, but what came out in a lawsuit recently, is that less than 30 cents on the dollar of businesses’ money is even going to ads that are seen by human eyeballs, let alone people who would actually respond to the ad. The rest is going to AI junk copies of websites or porn sites or pirated sites. So, it’s all this huge, huge mess, and I think we’re only barely starting to figure out what’s going on.
Meaghan: What can people do to protect their own privacy?
Rep. Priestly: Something important you can do is stop and think in the moment when you’re being asked to sign a contract allowing data to be collected or to provide some kind of identification. For example, a friend recently booked a hotel and found out that no one was going to be there to check her family in, the hotel was going to scan their faces. And there’s no protection that would prevent that hotel from selling the images of her face, her kids’ faces. Laws vary by state, but a lot of states don’t have any law protecting facial biometric data. So, if a business scans your face to let you in, they have the image, and that can be used across marketing platforms, and to track where you’re going. So, when you learn that you’re going to have data like that collected, you can pause and realize that you’re being asked to give up a piece of your identity and make a decision about whether to do that.
There are also basic things, like choosing web browsers that aren’t Chrome, Edge, or Safari. You can disable location on your apps. If you have an app like an exercise app and it says it needs access to your microphone, ask yourself why it would need access to your microphone, and turn that off.
We should also normalize talking about privacy. With everything going on with the federal government, we should ask, “Why do they have information about everything about us? What do corporations know about me, and why do they need to have that information?” Even if we don’t have the answers, just talking about these things is a start.
Since I’ve become a state legislator, I’ve met a lot of people who didn’t realize they could go and talk to their state representative. Before I was a state representative, I also didn’t realize how critical state lawmakers are. One important thing people can get involved by going to talk to their state legislators about privacy.

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