In Senate Hearing, Tech Giants Push Lawmakers For Federal Privacy Rules (techcrunch.com) 36
Another day, another hearing of tech giants in Congress. Wednesday's hearing at the Senate Commerce Committee with Apple, Amazon, Google and Twitter, alongside AT&T and Charter, marked the latest in a string of hearings in the past few months into all things tech: but mostly controversies embroiling the companies, from election meddling to transparency. This time, privacy was at the top of the agenda. The problem, lawmakers say, is that consumers have little of it. From a report: The hearing said that the U.S. was lagging behind Europe's new GDPR privacy rules and California's recently passed privacy law, which goes into effect in 2020, and lawmakers were edging toward introducing their own federal privacy law. AT&T, Apple, Charter and Google used their time in the Senate to call on lawmakers to introduce new federal privacy legislation. Tech companies spent the past year pushing back against the new state regulations, but have conceded that new privacy rules are inevitable. Now the companies realize that it's better to sit at the table to influence a federal privacy law than stand outside in the cold. In pushing for a new federal law, representatives from each company confirmed that they support the preemption of California's new rules -- something that critics oppose. AT&T's chief lawyer Len Cali said that a patchwork of state laws would be unworkable. Apple, too, agreed to support a privacy law, but noted as a company that doesn't hoard user data for advertising -- like Facebook and Google -- that any federal law would need to put a premium on protecting the consumer rather than helping companies make money. But Amazon's chief lawyer Andrew DeVore said that complying with privacy rules has "required us to divert significant resources to administrative tasks and away from invention."
What They Really Want (Score:4, Insightful)
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Which is cool because most businesses don't become shitty until they go national.
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it means that businesses that want to conduct business at the national level have to be aware of and adhere to fifty different sets of laws rather than one.
Which is precisely what the Commerce Clause was meant to deal with, but instead it's used to limit the rights of individual citizens.
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Stringency doesn't matter - the laws among states can conflict. One state may require that data be retained for at least one year so that it could be gathered for legal proceedings of future litigation while another state could require that data be kept for no more than three months. Now you have to determine which state every one of your users lives and create a separate d
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There are ways to sort out those conflicts, see for example the Uniform Commercial Code.
This is not to say that I'm for doing things in a patchwork way. However, state legislatures have shown themselves to be much less bought and paid for by corporations than congress so until we can deal with the corruption that money brings to congress I think we're forced into a situation where the best path forward is to do things at state levels.
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One state may require that data be retained for at least one year so that it could be gathered for legal proceedings of future litigation while another state could require that data be kept for no more than three months.
And that would be an excellent outcome. It would require all the online vendors to keep the absolute minimum amount of information about their customers that is possible.
There is no need for Amazon to 'gather information' about my past purchases from them. A law that prohibited them from keeping such a record wouldn't interfere with them selling to me at all, in any way.
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Psst, psst but if they know enough about you, as their favourite pet politician, they don't have to pay you as much and when they can create a stable of potential pet politicians, well, they can go the churn route. Get to uppity as their political slave, demand to much money and well, they'll just expose your ass and replace you with another pet from their stable of researched and disturbing sexual actions data verified potential pet politicians.
The silly fuckers might not yet fully understand but they are
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EFF had a good article on this.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/consumer-privacy-hearing-no-one-representing-consumers
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Of course they want rules (Score:4, Insightful)
Rules have loopholes (or are just written to benefit industry) and "it is legal" for some reason absolves a company of any ethical responsibility. To say nothing of adding compliance costs to dissuade startups. Of course they want rules.
Translated to English (Score:5, Informative)
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Not exactly true. Startups will have more issues complying with GDPR, California laws, and any local laws. That's what preventing them from going world-wide, while large companies can absorb that pretty easily.
The US should go for something that is as close to GDPR as possible. That way, it would incur NO cost for companies (*) since they already implement GDPR (and most of the time for all users so that it's simpler for them) while effectively improving user's privacy.
(*) Except for companies which busin
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Not exactly true. Startups will have more issues complying with GDPR, California laws, and any local laws. That's what preventing them from going world-wide, while large companies can absorb that pretty easily.
The US should go for something that is as close to GDPR as possible. That way, it would incur NO cost for companies (*) since they already implement GDPR (and most of the time for all users so that it's simpler for them) while effectively improving user's privacy.
(*) Except for companies which business model is based on selling users information, obviously.
You missed my point, which was regulations are often used by the regulated to create barriers to entry; in this case they would apply all through the US so a company could not find a state with lax protections to setup in and simply avoid doing business in highly regulated ones.
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True in general, but not in this case since they are asking for a universal rule across the US. Having per-state laws is worse for small competitors and restricts their ability to grow.
So, having consistent federal not-too-strict laws are better for businesses selling user information (your first point I think) but actually also better for small competitors who want to grow.
Some big companies spend a lot in lobbying to increase complexity of their own field because they know they can handle it better than
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True in general, but not in this case since they are asking for a universal rule across the US. Having per-state laws is worse for small competitors and restricts their ability to grow.
So, having consistent federal not-too-strict laws are better for businesses selling user information (your first point I think) but actually also better for small competitors who want to grow.
Some big companies spend a lot in lobbying to increase complexity of their own field because they know they can handle it better than the small actors. They are doing the opposite here : they want their job to be easier (and more importantly less regulated), but they're not trying to prevent competition.
Now, I haven't seen any company complain against GDPR. Some say it's a lot of constraints (like, it really protects users), but all seem to agree it is fair, so no company could publicly fight GDPR without clearly being anti-privacy -- and most Companies always publicly say they are pro-privacy, especially when their business model is selling user's data. I believe those laws should be like the internet : world-wide.
You make some good points but I disagree on two points:
1. They are doing the opposite here : they want their job to be easier (and more importantly less regulated), but they're not trying to prevent competition.I think they are trying to craft laws that give them an advantage as an incumbent. The know what is easy to do , what costs money and what is valuable and thus can make laws that setup barriers they have hurdled but are hard for a new entry to meet. In addition, they eliminate the possibility a sta
stop, my sides, ow... (Score:2)
NDA's will be unbrakable? (Score:1)
Break a NDA and go to federal prison.
Trump, Cosby endorse this.
That's a great idea! (Score:2)
Let's roll out California's laws nationwide!
Oh, you didn't mean you wanted a nationwide law, you meant you wanted a TOOTHLESS nationwide law.
Got it.
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