Intel’s head of U.S. government affairs thinks federal data privacy regulations could be coming to the U.S. next year, according to trade pub Corporate Counsel.
A bill imposing tough data privacy regulations similar to Europe’s GDPR may be filed before Congress in 2019 with bi-partisan support. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Senator Jerry Moran (R-KS) have already held talks on the matter and a provisional draft bill should be on the table soon.
The only sticking point seems to be the severity of financial penalties for data breaches. Moran isn’t very keen on punitive civil penalties similar to those in Europe.
Dominic Bosnjak explains more in this article from Android Headlines:
The subject of data privacy has been garnering a lot of traction in the U.S. over the course of this year, primarily due to a number of high-profile scandals such as Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica debacle and Google’s oversight that potentially compromised hundreds of thousands of Google+ users and went undisclosed for months, ultimately prompting the firm to shutter its struggling social media network for good. Numerous advocacy groups called for Congress to draft legislation akin to GDPR, one of the strictest information privacy laws ever enacted in the West. The legislation in question went into effect in late May and already allowed for a wide variety of complaints against the world’s largest technology companies, though its effectiveness has yet to be tested in the court of law.
Shortly after GDPR started being enforced, California Governor Jerry Brown signed the Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (AB275) which provided its residents with similar rights, allowing them to request their digital data held by private entities to be deleted and control the manner in which it’s collected and managed, in addition to finding out what exactly do Internet companies know about them. The law attracted significant criticism from the Silicon Valley, though the industry eventually stopped lobbying against it due to public pressure. A potential federal-level bill regulating data privacy may also pre-empt the said California legislation, though DNC lawmakers already publicly opposed such a turn of events. GOP members aren’t as one-minded about the issue, though it’s still unclear whether they’d be willing to agree to keep California’s law intact.
