Civic
A new survey from the Center for Democracy and Technology finds broad, bipartisan anxiety about how public agencies collect, store, and use personal information — and a clear public mandate for accountability.
NewsOnScale Staff
October 31, 2026
There is a version of the privacy debate in Washington that frames the whole problem as a matter of corporate surveillance — Big Tech harvesting behavioral data, selling it to advertisers, and escaping accountability behind layers of terms-of-service agreements. That framing is not wrong. But it is incomplete. A new report from the Center for Democracy and Technology makes a point that tends to get lost in that conversation: the government has your data too, and most Americans are worried about what happens to it.
The CDT survey, released this week, finds that concern about personal information held by public agencies is not a fringe position or a libertarian fixation. It is a majority view, and it cuts across demographic and partisan lines in ways that should be uncomfortable for elected officials who have treated government data governance as a low-priority technical matter.
## What the Public Actually Believes
The findings are worth sitting with. Americans report worrying about data collected by agencies spanning law enforcement, health services, tax authorities, and benefits programs. This is not abstract anxiety. People interact with these systems during some of the most consequential moments of their lives — applying for insurance, reporting a crime, filing taxes, seeking medical care — and they are handing over sensitive information with little clarity about how long it is retained, who can access it, under what legal authority, or whether it has ever been shared with third parties including private contractors or other government bodies.
The CDT data suggests that the public's unease is not primarily about data breaches, though those matter. It is about accountability. People want to know that someone is responsible for their information, that there are enforceable limits on its use, and that they have some recourse when those limits are violated. On all three counts, existing frameworks fall significantly short.
## The Governance Gap Nobody Talks About
Federal agencies operate under a patchwork of rules that vary by sector, era of enactment, and administrative interpretation. The Privacy Act of 1974 — the closest thing the U.S. has to a baseline framework for government data — was written before the internet existed and has been amended and exempted into near-incoherence. Agencies routinely invoke national security or law enforcement carve-outs to limit transparency about what they collect. Inspector general offices are underfunded and politically exposed. And congressional oversight, when it happens at all, tends to focus on the most dramatic failures rather than the structural conditions that make failure routine.
Into this gap has flowed an enormous volume of sensitive information: health records from pandemic-era programs, location data purchased from commercial brokers by federal law enforcement, biometric information collected at borders and in public spaces, financial records accessed through benefits administration. The legal and oversight infrastructure surrounding these data flows is thin and inconsistently applied.
## Why This Beats Deserves More Attention
The CDT report is useful precisely because it reframes the conversation. Privacy reform has stalled in part because it gets coded as a left-right issue or as a fight between Silicon Valley and Congress. But when the concern is about government agencies — institutions that have coercive power, that people cannot simply opt out of, and that are supposed to be answerable to the public — the politics shift. The demand for accountability stops being ideological and starts being civic.
That is exactly the kind of pressure that can move legislation, or at minimum force agencies to take voluntary steps toward transparency: clear data retention schedules, accessible audit logs, meaningful consent mechanisms where feasible, and genuine enforcement when rules are violated.
None of this requires treating government as inherently malicious. It requires treating it as an institution that accumulates power and needs structural constraints to remain trustworthy — which is, in theory, a principle with support across the political spectrum.
The public, according to this data, already understands that. The question is whether the institutions that hold their information are prepared to catch up.