We speak often with congressional staffers and members as well as advocates for industry, consumers, privacy, and civil rights. The two of us have been deeply involved in the public discussion of privacy legislation for more than a decade. At this hearing, Senators and business witnesses publicly softened their differences on the fractious issue of private lawsuits. Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Ranking Member Roger Wicker (R-MS) both affirmed their interest in working together on comprehensive legislation. The Senate Commerce Committee held its first privacy hearing this year in September. Now the Facebook files have rekindled the privacy debate. As privacy work slowed, Congress’ attention has turned to the many other concerns about Facebook and tech platforms, including their impact on children, free speech and disinformation, competition, and jobs. There is ample room for compromise on these issues, but little sense of urgency to do so. Ideological red lines that have frozen progress include whether a federal law should preempt state privacy laws in part or altogether, and whether to allow lawsuits by individuals for violations of privacy rights. Even though flagship bills from the leaders of the Senate Commerce Committee had encouraging areas of overlap, bipartisan agreement stalled. When it came to the hard bargaining, however, the early promise waned. Leading members called for legislation, several introduced bills, and multiple committees and working groups got to work toward bipartisan legislation. Galvanized by Facebook’s sharing of data with Cambridge Analytica, Congress made a promising start on comprehensive privacy legislation. Since then, Facebook has been a subject of some 70 hearings on privacy, competition, content moderation, misinformation, security, and diversity and inclusion, with 17 Facebook-affiliated witnesses. Every major democracy in the world has passed legislation to set boundaries on business data collection – and this month a new commercial privacy law took effect in China.Īfter the Cambridge Analytica stories in 2018, several congressional committees hauled in Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for back-to-back hearings carried live on cable news. ![]() It is past time for the United States to require businesses to use data responsibly and give individuals rights in data about them, safeguard that have been absent and that would protect everyone in America. This volume will soon explode even further as data-intensive technologies power augmented and virtual reality environments (the “metaverse” to which Facebook’s new corporate name refers), and autonomous vehicles in the streets communicate with sensors that monitor traffic and pedestrian safety. IBM estimates that the world generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day – that’s 2.5 followed by 18 zeroes. ![]() Every day that passes without a baseline privacy protection law in effect is another day that not just Facebook, but a multitude of businesses, collect and use data generated from billions of devices. ![]() Congress should not let this latest “Facebook moment” pass without meaningful action.
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