Articles

As 2025 ended, the Insights Association reflected on a year of sustained advocacy victories and ongoing challenges across consumer privacy, data security, artificial intelligence, taxation, and more policy issues directly affecting the insights industry. This final Fighting for You update of the year highlights where we successfully held the line, where new risks are emerging, and how your support positions us to continue the fight in 2026.

In between all the raking of leaves, the Insights Association continued its vigorous advocacy on the most pressing legislative and regulatory issues shaping the U.S. insights industry, from evolving state privacy frameworks to emerging artificial intelligence restrictions and even challenges to the census. November’s update highlights where IA is pushing back, pushing forward, and protecting your ability to conduct responsible, effective research.

This October has been a scary time for the insights industry, and not just because of Halloween. Maryland’s new comprehensive privacy law – one of the strictest yet – and a wave of new California laws ranging from chatbot disclosure mandates, to imposing liability for AI-related harm, tightening consent rules, restricting algorithms, and faster data breach notifications, all brought significant compliance challenges for insights professionals. Federal bills signaled competing approaches to na...

September brought interesting developments in advocacy issues facing the U.S. insights industry, including a gaggle of new state laws on data privacy and artificial intelligence (AI), the business community coalescing to defend the American Community Survey (ACS), a critical privacy decision in a European courtroom, a changing human resources landscape, and other legislation.

The European Court of Justice (CJEU) recently dismissed a case brought against the new mechanism for trans-Atlantic data transfers, the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (DPF). Insights work can continue unimpeded as a result.

As summer wound down, the legal, legislative and regulatory issues facing the insights industry continued to wind up, with a ton of new privacy laws, regulations and court cases across the U.S., new laws and legal challenges for artificial intelligence in the insights context, President Trump calling out the decennial census, and more rules and compliance guidance for accessibility online. Let's dive in...

Amidst all the advocacy wildfires for the insights industry, the Insights Association found significant wins on federal tax reporting thresholds, and support for professional insights education. Other legal, regulatory and legislative developments in July included heightened enforcement of data privacy and security rules, evolving policies on artificial intelligence, developments in health care, new state laws on non-compete agreements, challenges to the classification of research subjects as in...

As part of a newly-announced trade deal between the U.S. and Indonesia, the White House stressed the agreement would "unlock major breakthroughs for America’s... digital sectors."

June brought lots of sizzling policy developments for the insights industry -- some promising, others challenging. Thankfully, the Insights Association was right in the thick of it. Let’s look at some wins on privacy issues and political polling, a troubling GDPR case in Europe, lots of new guidance on privacy, AI, HR, and email laws, developments on indirect costs in federally-funded research, and more.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) withdrew a regulatory proposal that could have unfairly applied restrictions in the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) to the work of many insights professionals. It would have been a misguided legal end-run around Congress to create a federal privacy law.