Administration Urges Congress to Pass Data Privacy Laws
The White House plans to “quickly engage” with federal lawmakers to implement baseline, enforceable data privacy laws, said Danny Weitzner, policy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, at an event Thursday hosted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Media and Technology Institute. Last month the White House unveiled its proposal for data privacy protections, called the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. The voluntary code of conduct aims to protect privacy rights of online consumers while giving them more control over how their information is handled.
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Federal privacy legislation must be directly enforceable based on the FTC’s Section 5 authority, Weitzner said. He added that any legislation should include an FTC-designed safe harbor process to shield companies that proactively implement data privacy policies. “It is no secret to anyone that the political challenges of achieving privacy legislation are substantial … but it is our intention not to wait to implement these principles,” Weitzner said. “We think this is an issue that has bipartisan interest. It has interest from consumer advocates and industry groups. The challenge is … finding a framework that advances all of the legitimate interests that are coming to the table.”
Senate Communications Subcommittee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., told the event that “businesses should not be collecting information, anybody’s information, and then selling it off to the highest bidder for any purpose without your consent. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it, it means you have to invite people into the process and let them have a choice as to whether they want to have that done.”
Kerry is a co-sponsor of the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act (S-799), which he said offers a “good balance” between consumer privacy and companies’ data collection practices. Kerry said the bipartisan bill ensures that each business “secures that information, communicates to the individual that they are in fact collecting information about their activity on the Internet, and then tell[s] them what the purpose is that they are doing that for and whether or not they want their information used in that way. And then if the information is transferred to a third party the [individual’s] rights … go with that journey.”
Weitzner dismissed accusations that the administration’s data privacy proposal reflects the European approach to the issue. “These are American privacy principles,” he said. “To say that this is somehow a sharp right or left turn to Europe is to mistake the history of privacy and the United States leadership in that concept.” House Commerce Manufacturing Subcommittee Chairman Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., said last month that she didn’t want U.S. privacy policies to “become the EU’s and have something rushed out there that we're trying to undo years and years later.”
The U.S. and its international allies have “significant work to do” to bring greater consistency over international data privacy policies, Weitzner said. “The shape of privacy policies around the world have an immediate effect on U.S. industries,” he said. “Unless we address this issue in the way that we address privacy policy in the U.S., then we are all at risk of having a very serious trade problem on our hands.”