Online privacy

At an event celebrating the 20th anniversary of his Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) said protecting children's privacy is a moving target, but a target that must be hit -- including taking on big companies who collect and mine children's data. Sen Markey said his strategy will be to push for extending COPPA protections to all children under 16 (currently it is under 13) and for an eraser button that allows parents and kids to delete information from their online history (the California privacy bill has such an eraser button).

Voters in elections tend to focus on topline policy issues such as the economy and health care, not tech policy, which enjoys considerable bipartisan agreement and offers little opportunity to highlight differences with opponents. Network neutrality internet regulation is an exception, as Democratic lawmakers use it both as symbolic politics at the federal and state level and as a wedge issue to bring millennial voters, a group with historically low turnout in midterms, to the polls.

On Oct 10, privacy advocates got their turn to speak before the Senate Commerce Committee, laying out the necessity of a national privacy law that goes beyond the protections already offered by some states. The hearing highlighted that consumer advocates and industry representatives don’t always see eye-to-eye on how protective a national law should be. But who will get to influence the legislation while it is drafted? “I want to be clear that the next federal privacy law will not be written by industry,” Chairman John Thune (R-SD) said.

Only half of US businesses affected by the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 expect to be compliant by the 2020 deadline, according to a PwC survey of more than 300 executives at US companies with revenues of $500 million or more. The law — CCPA for short — is expected to provide state residents sweeping data-privacy rights that most businesses will only be able to honor by first overhauling their personal data-governance capabilities.

Add Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) to the lengthening list of lawmakers who want answers from Google about the Google+ data vulnerability it chose not to tell its users about. Sen Grassley wants the company to explain how it is protecting personal info given that the "glitches" apparently went unaddressed for three years. Sen Grassley invited Google to join Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at an April 10 hearing on data privacy and social media, but he says Google declined because it said it didn’t have the same data privacy issues as Facebook had.

A Q&A with Sen Mark Warner (D-VA). 

On Oct 10, the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing titled "Consumer Data Privacy: Examining Lessons From the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act.” The hearing provided the opportunity for Sens to hear from privacy advocates about the types of consumer protections to consider in future legislation. Witnesses included: Dr.

Google’s plan to lower the risk of another privacy gaffe is likely to disrupt business for scores of app developers that build services using the wealth of data generated by the world’s most popular email service. The Alphabet unit said it is reining in the data it makes available to outside developers of Gmail apps as part of a broader effort to secure the privacy of its users.