US contemplates its own version of GDPR

The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration has started a 30-day public hearing process to gather comments on its policy options towards consumer privacy protection.

Shortly after Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force in late May, “a global tidal wave of new and updated privacy regulations” have followed hot on the heels of GDPR as it was called at the recent Digital Futures conference (see the picture). Regulations and laws passed in jurisdictions from India to California with other markets in between have largely modelled after the European legislation.

In the latest move, on Tuesday September 25, the US federal government, through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), kick-started a month-long process to hear from the public on the approach towards privacy protection.

“The United States has a long history of protecting individual privacy, but our challenges are growing as technology becomes more complex, interconnected, and integrated into our daily lives,” said David Redl, NTIA Administrator and Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information. “The Trump Administration is beginning this conversation to solicit ideas on a path for adapting privacy to today’s data-driven world.”

The feedback requested is two-fold. The first part is on the outcome of any future privacy legislation. This includes:

All these are rather similar to what GDPR and the up-coming e-Privacy regulation are designed to achieve.

Meanwhile the NTIA is also requesting comments on the overall “High-Level Goals for Federal Action”, the key points including:

However a few other points stand out that deserve a closer look. One probably deserves a full quote:

Employ a risk and outcome-based approach.  Instead of creating a compliance model that creates cumbersome red tape—without necessarily achieving measurable privacy protections—the approach to privacy regulations should be based on risk modeling and focused on creating user-centric outcomes.  Risk-based approaches allow organizations the flexibility to balance business needs, consumer expectations, legal obligations, and potential privacy harms, among other inputs, when making decisions about how to adopt various privacy practices.  Outcome-based approaches also enable innovation in the methods used to achieve privacy goals.  Risk and outcome-based approaches have been successfully used in cybersecurity, and can be enforced in a way that balances the needs of organizations to be agile in developing new products, services, and business models with the need to provide privacy protections to their customers, while also ensuring clarity in legal compliance.

NTIA’s focus is clearly to avoid heavy-handed measures to regulate what can be done, but rather giving flexibility to businesses to make their own judgement what measures to take. This is also in the same spirit as the first part of the consultation which is “focuses on the desired outcomes of organizational practices, rather than dictating what those practices should be.”

Another point that draws our attention is related to “Scalability”, which stresses that small companies operating in good faith, and 3^rd party processing data on behalf of other organisations should be treated differently from big companies that own and control personal data.

The two points above combined make a balanced message for the internet giants, which are not necessarily the biggest fans of privacy regulations. While they are afforded more flexibility, they are also going to be treated more strictly if they contravene. However as we wrote earlier, because of their size, the Googles and Facebooks of the world are much quicker in ticking the compliance boxes.

One more point that worth highlighting, probably for entertainment purposes than anything else, relates to “Interoperability” with other major global legislations. Here, for whatever reason it pointedly does not refer to GDPR but uses the example of “APEC Cross-Border Privacy Rules System.”

In general, the NTIA’s approach is balanced and measured, which is largely in line with our attitude towards privacy protection. On one hand we deplore the blatant abuse of privacy by companies like Facebook and Cambridge Analytics. On the other hand, we also sympathise with the small and medium-sized businesses operating in Europe, most of which had to scramble some policies at the eleventh hour, but may still fall foul of consumers. France’s private data protection agency CNIL (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés) registered a 64% increase in consumer complaints after GDPR came to force over the same four months last year.

As Mary Meeker highlighted, draconian laws could limit the exploratory nature of tech innovators. That many countries model their privacy legislation after GDPR confirmed that Europe’s policymakers are “world-class in setting standards”, as a recent article in The Economist put it. But in the same article the newspaper also highlighted the gap between Europe and the AI leaders, China and US, neither of which is role model in guarding individual privacy, though for entirely different purposes.

In a recent Telecoms.com online poll, a third of the respondents agreed with the statement that there should be “flexible rules to allow users to trade privacy for benefits”. An optimal regulatory environment should give this minority group the freedom to do so while providing the other two third consumers with strict privacy protection.