In Senate Hearing, Tech Giants Push Lawmakers For Federal Privacy Rules (techcrunch.com)

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."

Comments

What They Really Want

[Anonymous Coward]

What they really want is to get the federal legislators, who they already have in their pockets, to develop federal laws that are favorable to the tech companies and will override all state laws.

Re:What They Really Want

[technosaurus]

You act like the legislators write the laws. They don't even read them. Special interests write the laws and summarize them for each key legislator. Most of the legislation is so verbose that they could require blood sacrifices and nobody would ever notice till it was passed.

Re:What They Really Want

[BenFranske]

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.

Re:What They Really Want

[CanHasDIY]

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.

Of course they want rules

[Actually, I do RTFA]

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

[Registered Coward v2]

AT&T, Apple, Charter and Google used their time in the Senate to call on lawmakers to introduce new federal privacy legislation. translates to "We are worried states will setup tougher standards, such as CA is doing, and we want the feds to step in and preempt state laws with federal rules that we can influence cheaper by buying key congress members rather than having to buy legislatures in 50 states. In addition, strict, but not to strict, rules will make it harder for competitors since it will cost money to setup the structures to comply with them, creating more barriers to entry and less of a threat of a new company disrupting our thing."