By Kristina Peterson and Lindsay Wise
WASHINGTON -- House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Thursday
backed the idea of national legislation to safeguard consumers'
data privacy, adding a prominent GOP voice to the growing
bipartisan support in Congress for tackling how technology
companies amass and use that information.
Lawmakers from both parties in the House and Senate have been
working on many bills aimed at strengthening individuals' ability
to control their data collected by the biggest technology
companies, including Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Facebook Inc. and
Apple Inc.
It isn't yet clear which, if any, legislation could secure
enough support to become law. But the comments from Mr. McCarthy
and others indicated that there was significant bipartisan support
for establishing stronger privacy guidelines.
"There needs to be a national-level regulation, not
state-by-state on what we're going to do about privacy," Mr.
McCarthy, a California Republican, said in an interview Thursday
with The Wall Street Journal. "We should know what data you keep on
us. We should be able to take our data and be able to delete our
data."
Mr. McCarthy, a California Republican, said he plans to
introduce legislation that would ensure that people know what data
companies are tracking and allow them to transfer or delete that
data.
A data-privacy law passed last year in California helped spur
action from both Mr. McCarthy and a bipartisan group of lawmakers
working on privacy legislation in the Senate. Many view the law,
set to take effect in January 2020, as the strictest
consumer-privacy law in the U.S.
The California law broadens the definition of what constitutes
personal information and gives the state's consumers the right to
prohibit the sale of personal data to third parties and opt out of
sharing it altogether.
"If California goes into effect and then every other state's
doing one, we're going to disrupt whatever growth we can have
within technology and innovation," Mr. McCarthy said.
The California law is somewhat similar to Europe's General Data
Protection Regulation, which took effect last year. One difference
is that the California measure includes more provisions allowing
consumers to opt out of data sharing as opposed to forcing them to
opt in before continuing to use online sites.
Passage of the California law helped spur the formation in the
U.S. Senate of a working group last year that is drafting what they
hope will be landmark data-privacy legislation. Composed of members
of the Commerce Committee, the group includes the panel's chairman,
Roger Wicker (R., Miss.), Sens. Jerry Moran (R., Kan.), Richard
Blumenthal (D., Conn.), and Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii). The group
this year added two more high-profile lawmakers: Sen. John Thune of
South Dakota, now the GOP whip, and Sen. Maria Cantwell of
Washington, the committee's top Democrat.
"My goal is a strong law that's stronger than California, that's
more workable to innovation than Europe," Mr. Wicker said Thursday.
"And that it's so acceptable to all parties that we can avoid a
patchwork of state by state."
Staff members from the working group are expected to meet Friday
to discuss the draft legislation. Mr. Wicker hopes to introduce a
bill before the Senate's August recess, a goal primarily driven by
a desire to get the bill passed before the California law takes
effect in January, according to a GOP aide familiar with the
discussions.
Mr. Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Commerce Committee's
consumer protection panel, said there was "very powerful support
for privacy legislation across party lines because most people
don't regard it in any way as a partisan issue."
Still, there will be plenty of details for lawmakers to tangle
over, in particular the interaction between any new federal
legislation and the California state law.
"That's a big part of this whole discussion -- how can we do
this in a way that respects the states that do want the strong
laws?" said Sen. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), who is working on
legislation focused on online privacy protections for children
under the age of 16.
Some lawmakers were skeptical that Congress would be able to
agree on an approach to privacy guidelines.
"I hope that we'll pass something, but you know, we'll see,"
said Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.), a freshman lawmaker who has
introduced two bipartisan privacy bills of his own since taking
office in January. "I don't know how much enthusiasm there is for
that on the Republican side right now," he said.
Some Democrats have called for taking more forceful action to
limit the power of the biggest technology companies. Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D., Mass.), who is running for president, called in March
for breaking up some companies, including Amazon.com Inc., Google
and Facebook, saying they have too much power over the economy, and
urged regulation of Google and Facebook as utilities.
Technology companies have warmed to a national privacy law as
the implementation of the California approaches, hoping a federal
rule would be less stringent and provide a sole set of guidelines.
Supporters of big tech companies have warned against regulation
that could threaten competition in the sector.
Mr. McCarthy said he disagreed with the idea of breaking up big
technology companies.
"If you break up a company, it does nothing about privacy," he
said. "That's going to take away innovation."
Separately, the House Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel last
week opened a bipartisan investigation into tech companies and
antitrust laws. The congressional probe comes as the Justice
Department prepares to investigate Google, while the Federal Trade
Commission plans to focus on the dominance of Facebook. In
addition, Apple and Amazon could come under scrutiny by the
agencies.
Write to Kristina Peterson at kristina.peterson@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 20, 2019 18:39 ET (22:39 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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