SEC loses routine access to investor personal data under new privacy bill
S. 658 — Protecting Investors’ Personally Identifiable Information Act · Filed by John Kennedy (R-LA) · 8 cosponsors · Introduced Feb 20, 2025 · Referred to committee
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What it does
This bill prohibits the SEC from requiring securities exchanges and brokers to routinely collect and report personally identifiable information (names, addresses, Social Security numbers, email addresses, IP addresses, etc.) as part of consolidated audit trail reporting. The SEC can still request this information for specific investigations of securities law violations, but must destroy it within one day of concluding the investigation.
Why we flagged it
The bill's operative mechanism is a prohibition on routine data collection by a federal regulator, paired with a narrow exception for targeted investigations. It is fundamentally a privacy-protective constraint on SEC authority, not a deregulation or industry carve-out.
What the text implies
- The 24-hour response requirement and 1-day destruction mandate may create operational friction for SEC investigations, potentially slowing complex multi-party fraud probes that require sustained data access.
- Exchanges and brokers lose a standing obligation to maintain centralized PII records for audit purposes, shifting compliance burden and potentially fragmenting market surveillance data.
- The exception for 'investigations' is defined narrowly (SEC must make a request; information must relate to a specific violation or enforcement action), which may exclude proactive market-monitoring uses that do not yet constitute formal investigations.
Section numbers refer to the bill text the analysis read — linked under Primary records below.
Who it affects
Ordinary investors retain privacy by reducing routine collection and centralized storage of their personal identifiers at the SEC, while the SEC retains targeted investigative access when pursuing actual securities violations. The bill narrows a standing surveillance mandate without eliminating law enforcement capability.
Who stands to gain
- securities exchanges and brokers (reduced compliance and data-handling costs)
- market participants and retail investors (reduced routine PII collection and centralized storage)
Named in the bill
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), national securities exchanges, national securities associations, 17 CFR 242.613(c)(7), consolidated audit trail (CAT)
Where it stands
8 cosponsors: 8 Republicans.
- Feb 20, 2025 — Introduced · Congress.gov: “Introduced in Senate”
- Feb 20, 2025 — Referred to Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs · Congress.gov: “Read twice and referred to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs”
Dates and quoted wording are Congress.gov's action record; the timeline shows status changes, not every procedural step.
Money around this bill
1 lobbying clients named this bill on 2 disclosure filings across 2 quarters, Dec 2025 to Jun 2026. Those filings disclosed $170,000 in lobbying spend. A filing names 16 bills on average, so that figure is what each filing reported, not a share belonging to this bill.
More lobbying clients named this bill than 0% of bills with at least one filing.
John Kennedy, the sponsor, reported $113,800 in PAC receipts in the 2026 cycle.
- American Securities Association — $170,000 on 2 filings
Lobbying Disclosure Act filings through Jul 15, 2026. A filing shows who paid to lobby on a bill it names, not what changed.
How this was measured
Analysis — Quorum's AI read the bill text published by Congress.gov (2,601 characters) on Sep 21, 2026. Section numbers in the findings refer to that text, linked below; transparency and hidden-provision scores are compared against the median of 14,522 analysed bills.
Status and sponsors — Congress.gov's bill record — actions, committee referrals and cosponsors — loaded nightly. The timeline shows status changes, not every procedural action.
Money — Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings whose specific-issue field names this bill for quarters ending Dec 2025 to Jun 2026. A filing's amount is reported whole beside the median number of bills a filing names; it is never divided across them. PAC receipts are FEC-reported contributions to the sponsor's candidate committee in the 2026 cycle.
As of — lobbying records through Jul 15, 2026 · page rendered 2026-09-21.
“SEC loses routine access to investor personal data under new privacy bill” QuorumCivic. https://share.quorumcivic.app/bill/119/s658 Report an error