REGULATORS, ACADEMICS, AND INDUSTRY LEADERS WEIGH IN ON THE FUTURE OF PRIVACY LEGISLATION
Panel 1: How has the pandemic changed our views on privacy, and what does that mean for existing and future regulation and legislation?
Congress has been debating federal privacy legislation for some 20 years, with increased urgency following Europe’s adoption of GDPR and state’s, including California, adopting their own laws. At a recent Senate hearing, a group of former FTC chairs and commissioners representing different parties and points of view all supported strong privacy legislation, but many specifics remain unaddressed.
Ensuring that any privacy law yields net benefits requires answering the fundamental questions about how to make the inevitable tradeoffs and who should be responsible for making them. Those questions are more important and more difficult today given the data needs associated with the coronavirus crisis and its aftermath.
This panel will discuss the tradeoff between privacy and beneficial uses of data in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, the impact of privacy considerations on fighting Covid, and what a new privacy law should include, and features:
Jane Bambauer, Professor of Law, James E. Rogers College of Law, The University of Arizona
Christina Montgomery, Vice President & Chief Privacy Officer, IBM
Maureen Ohlhausen, Section Chair, Antitrust & Competition Law Firm Partner, Baker Botts LLP
Andrew Smith, Director, Bureau of Consumer Protection, Federal Trade Commission
Catherine Tucker, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management Science and Professor Marketing and Chair of the MIT Sloan PhD Program at MIT Sloan School of Management
Thomas Lenard (moderator), Senior Fellow and President Emeritus, Technology Policy Institute
Panel 2: How is the world regulating privacy, and what does that mean for the US?
Privacy policy is an important issue around the world, with rules in one country having repercussions in other countries. Privacy issues can also affect the very structure of the internet and digital economy. Data flows and data localization rules, for example, are linked to privacy concerns, and rules on where data is stored begin to have spillover economic effects on international trade in services, among other issues. A recent decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union invalidated the privacy framework under which thousands of U.S. companies operate in Europe, threatening data flows. Additionally, while privacy and other policy objectives naturally differ across countries, those two objectives are not always consistent within countries. The U.S., for example, generally opposes data localization laws but also sometimes insists on them as a means to protect the privacy of people’s personal data.
This panel will discuss how privacy rules differ across the globe, how different countries handle the tradeoffs implied by their laws, and what each country or region’s laws mean for others.
The panel includes:
Bruno Gencarelli, Head of Unit, International Data Flows and Protection, European Commission
Catherine de Fontenay, Commissioner, Australia Productivity Commission
Andrea Jelinek, Chair, European Data Protection Board; Director, Austrian Data Protection Authority
Kenneth Propp, Senior Fellow, Atlantic Council
Scott Wallsten (moderator), President and Senior Fellow, Technology Policy Institute
Register today to reserve your spot! To view the full list of speakers and learn more about the Forum, visit our website.
For Additional Information:
Jane Creel, 202-828-4405, [email protected]
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The Technology Policy Institute
The Technology Policy Institute is a non-profit research and educational organization that focuses on the economics of innovation, technological change, and related regulation in the United States and around the world. More information is available at http://www.techpolicyinstitute.org/.
