Blackburn, Hawley, Blumenthal, Coons Form Judiciary Privacy Working Group

Graham told us Judiciary must work in concert with the Senate Commerce Committee, which has primary jurisdiction on privacy and previously formed a bipartisan working group (see 1903050074). Judiciary’s focus will be oversight and regulation for social media content moderation. That item has been a constant talking point for conservatives like Hawley.

Blumenthal told us he discussed with Graham “ways to mesh” legislative efforts between Commerce and Judiciary, putting together one bill or multiple bills. The Judiciary working group isn't necessarily as “formal” as Blumenthal’s Commerce group, Coons told us. It's a group of senators who are “strongly interested in privacy and trying to move the ball forward,” Coons said. He cited related roundtables convened last year by him and then-Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. Graham is “genuinely interested in this topic [and] sees it as an area that requires a careful and deliberative” legislative process, Coons said.

Ranking member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., won’t support a federal law that weakens California’s privacy law, she said during the hearing. Hawley criticized Google for not allowing Android users to “meaningfully” opt out of geolocation tracking services. Google Senior Privacy Counsel Will DeVries told Hawley if location tracking services were completely off, including for Maps, the phones wouldn’t work properly. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave,” Hawley said.

Google supports a federal, pre-emptive privacy law that doesn’t weaken the standard in California, DeVries said, and all industry witnesses agreed. Asked by Blumenthal, none of the industry witnesses said their companies oppose a federal law granting the FTC rulemaking or first-offense civil penalty authority.

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg, whose web-search company pitches itself as a trustworthy alternative to Google, said “data monopolies” are at the core of the privacy problem. Federal law should bar companies like Facebook and Google from consolidating user data across multiple platforms, Weinberg said. He called California’s privacy law and the EU’s general data protection regulation pro-consumer, pro-business and pro-advertising.

California’s do-not-track provision allows users to bar industry from selling personal data, which could end big data mining and increase competition, said Californians for Consumer Privacy Chairman Alastair MacTaggart. A new federal law should provide better data protection and rigorous enforcement, including additional personnel and original fining authority for the FTC, said Center for Democracy and Technology Privacy and Data Project Director Michelle Richardson. University of Arizona law professor Jane Bambauer suggested the agency create a privacy compliance certification process. American Enterprise Institute Visiting Scholar Roslyn Layton warned against suffering the same pitfalls as the GDPR, which she said doesn’t increase consumer trust, insulates and strengthens incumbents, silences free speech and increases cyber risks and identity theft.

Hawley and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., introduced legislation Tuesday to update the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The bill would bar internet companies from “collecting personal and location information from anyone under 13 without parental consent and from anyone 13- to 15-years old without the user’s consent.” It would enable parents and children to delete data and create an FTC Youth Privacy and Marketing Division. Information Technology and Innovation Foundation Vice President Daniel Castro called the proposal “misguided and regressive,” given major impacts on low- and middle-class families: The legislation “makes it even more difficult for companies to provide free ad-supported digital apps and services.”