Google announced today that the company has signed on to a lobbying effort calling for federal consumer privacy legislation. The Mountain View, Ca. based company joins up with other technology and economic powerhouses like Microsoft, Intel, Eli Lilly, and eBay.
Citing a “patchwork quilt of state privacy laws” intended to protect health, financial, and children’s data that overlap and contradict each other, Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel for Google, made the announcement Google’s official blog.
“This matrix of laws is complex, incomplete, and sometimes contradictory. For consumers, the result is a set of privacy protections that are uneven at best,” wrote Wong. “On an Internet beset with spyware, malware, phishing, identity-theft, and other privacy threats, enforcement of privacy protections has become an industry-wide challenge, and highlights the lack of a coherent regulatory structure.”
Google was recently involved in a row with the U.S. government after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sought reams of search data held on Google servers in an effort to combat child pornography. Among Microsoft and Yahoo!, Google was the lone hold-out until a federal judge granted limited access after the federal government attempted to enforce the subpoena.
From the corporate coalition’s petition (PDF) to Congress:
Today we live in a digital economy where both beneficial and potentially harmful uses of personal information are multiplying. Information about individuals is used by businesses to: provide consumers with an unprecedented array of goods and services;
increase productivity; promote access to financial products; and protect individuals, business and society from fraud and other bad acts. However, that same information can also be misused to harm individuals, with results such as identity theft, deception, unwarranted intrusion, embarrassment, and loss of consumer confidence.
The time has come for a serious process to consider comprehensive harmonized federal privacy legislation to create a simplified, uniform but flexible legal framework. The legislation should provide protection for consumers from inappropriate collection and misuse of their personal information and also enable legitimate businesses to use information to promote economic and social value. In principle, such legislation would address businesses collecting personal information from consumers in a transparent manner with appropriate notice; providing consumers with meaningful choice regarding the use and disclosure of that information; allowing consumers reasonable access to personal information they have provided; and protecting such information from misuse or unauthorized access. Because a national standard would preempt state laws, a robust framework is warranted.
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