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posted by martyb on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the of-course-it-would-apply-to-the-NSA-too dept.

Commissioners for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) testifying before the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Wednesday called for a national privacy law.

Such a law would regulate how large tech and social media companies collect, manage, and retain user data.

The lack of a National Privacy Law

keeps the country from parity with the EU and its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)...

...or, for that matter, with the state of California, with its California's Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Several national privacy bills have been introduced in the past 12 months. One, called the Data Care Act (DCA), was introduced by 15 senators and has strong industry support from the likes of Facebook, Apple, Verizon, Google, Twitter, Mozilla and Microsoft. Another was introduced by Washington Senator Suzan Delbene, another by Senator Ron Wyden dubbed the Consumer Data Protection Act, and still another called the American Data Dissemination (ADD) Act by Senator Marco Rubio.

Besides consumer protection, the FTC is looking for more power. Commissioners asked Congress to strengthen the agency's ability to police violations, asking for more resources and greater authority to impose penalties.

The usual concerns attend the bills such as costs to small businesses and startups, compatibility with and effect on existing privacy laws, and resistance to continuing to allow California to dictate in the tech sector.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 12 2019, @02:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 12 2019, @02:18PM (#842672)

    I'm old fashioned, but there was a time when the phone company took protecting their client's communication private seriously.
    (As in go to jail if you don't, and yes, these days that should include metadata as well.)

    The Internet could have the same rules if one had two things:
    1) Similar jail time rules for the providers of access and transit.
    2) A way to mark packets to be limited to a single jurisdiction.

    Without this sort of rules, a national law is going to trickey because the company can always route packets to another jurisdiction.
    Given this sort of rules in the basic packet moving structure, one could start to think about what companies can do with it.
    Perhaps there is a P2P way to do social media which might provide competition to FB their ilk.
    Aside from central control and monetization, I'm not sure there is a technical reason the FB functionality could not be distributed.

    Search may not be the same sort of thing.
    Even as G works to eliminate it with user specific search results, there is value in going to a single place to look for something over the whole Internet.
    Not sure if P2P search at Internet scale is practical?