Warren, Scanlon Bill Targets Chatbot Health Data Sales

Senators Warren and Scanlon introduced a bill barring the sale of Americans' health and location data to brokers, naming chatbot conversations with ChatGPT and Claude specifically, per The Verge.

That matters for anyone building a product where people describe a health condition or a location to a chatbot. It's one of the first federal proposals to treat that conversation itself as protected data.

The bill is called the Health and Location Data Protection Act. It would stop data brokers from buying or selling health and location information pulled from Americans, including data revealed inside AI chatbot exchanges.

That would be new ground for federal privacy law. Existing rules generally do not treat chatbot logs as protected health or location data, and this is among the first legislative moves to change that. If it passes, health or location details typed into ChatGPT or Claude would get the same protection as other health and location data.

My take: the broker-sale ban probably won't survive as written. The precedent will. Expect other privacy bills to start naming ChatGPT and Claude as sources of protected health data, whether or not this one passes. Watch for that framing to show up next, not for the vote count.

This is worth watching before any vote happens, since it's among the first federal privacy bills to name ChatGPT and Claude conversations directly.