Illinois considers privacy law while the state violates privacy of thousands

While the state moves to impose costly new requirements on private businesses in the name of privacy, the state is itself violating the privacy of thousands of Illinoisans.

The Illinois House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill Dec. 2, supposedly aimed at protecting people’s private data. Unfortunately, the bill would do nothing to stop many privacy violations by one of Illinois’s biggest offenders: the state government, which has been sharing thousands of residents’ personal information with a government-worker union without the individuals’ knowledge or consent.

The bill, which is now before the Illinois Senate, would require, among other things, that businesses implement security measures to protect Illinois residents’ “personal information” and issue notices to Illinois residents when a security breach allows third parties to access the residents’ personal information. The “personal information” the bill protects includes, among other things, a person’s Social Security number when it’s combined with the person’s first name or first initial and last name.

But while the state is moving to impose costly new requirements on private businesses in the name of privacy, the state is itself violating the privacy of thousands of Illinoisans by giving their Social Security numbers and other personal information to a third party – specifically, the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU – without those persons’ permission and without any apparent data security requirements.

The state’s privacy violations are a result of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s unionization of certain home care workers and child care providers. The home care providers are people who receive Medicaid subsidies to take care of severely disabled people in their homes. (Often, the provider and the person for whom he or she cares are related – for example, as parent and child – and live in the same home.) The child care providers include small-business owners who run home day cares and happen to serve children from families enrolled in the state’s Child Care Assistance Program, or CCAP; they also include people who care for relatives enrolled in the CCAP.

None of the home care and day care providers Blagojevich unionized are state employees, which is why the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2014 that the state could not force these providers to pay fees to SEIU.

But even though the state can no longer force providers to give SEIU their money, it still recognizes SEIU as the providers’ “exclusive representative.”

And SEIU’s collective bargaining agreements with the state, which were entered under former Gov. Pat Quinn’s administration, require the state to give SEIU the names and Social Security numbers of all home care and day care providers covered by the agreement – even those who aren’t union members.

This privacy violation affects a large number of people: About 20,000 people participate in the home care program, and more than 50,000 child care providers receive funds through the CCAP. Most of them have chosen not to join SEIU and therefore presumably would not want SEIU to receive their private information without their permission.

In November, the Liberty Justice Center and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Fund filed a lawsuit to end SEIU’s representation of home care and day care providers because, under the First Amendment, the government should not be allowed to appoint “exclusive representatives” to speak to the government on behalf of groups of people – who aren’t even state employees – against their will. If that lawsuit succeeds, then SEIU’s collective bargaining agreements for the providers will be nullified, and the state will no longer give SEIU providers’ private information.

But the lawsuit will take a long time to play out in the courts, and there’s no reason why the state couldn’t start protecting providers’ privacy immediately. If the General Assembly really cares about protecting privacy, it can and should pass a law prohibiting the state from giving unions the Social Security numbers and other private information of people who aren’t union members.