It’s not the world’s premier data privacy law, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), but it does offer a great deal of data privacy for Americans. Albeit, ham handedly.

Yesterday, in another show of bipartisan spirit, the US House of Representatives passed the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act. The bill prohibits data brokers from selling American citizens data to China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.

Data brokers caught selling data to these countries would face penalties from the Federal Trade Commission. I read the bill and didn’t see explicit penalties laid out, but the FTC will hand them down. The bill sailed through the House, unanimously, with all 414 representatives who voted, passing it.

Lawmakers were seen beating their chests claiming this bill, combined with the Ban TikTok bill would improve the American public’s data privacy interests, and keep our data out of foreign hands. The real problem is that there is no national data privacy bill. The California Consumer Privacy Act is the most comprehensive data privacy law in the US, but it only applies to California. And there hasn’t been any real movement on coming up with a comprehensive national privacy law that protects American privacy rights similar to the GDPR. The real answer is that lawmakers here really don’t care. They just want to stick it to TikTok.