Mar 1, 2019
On Capitol Hill this week, Congress held two back-to-back hearings on a potential U.S. federal privacy bill. The aim was to gain insights from expert witnesses on what such a bill should contain. At the first hearing, at the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, industry and advocates debated how prescriptive a federal law should be. At the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on Wednesday, lawmakers asked witnesses whether a U.S. law should model itself on the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, or perhaps California's Consumer Privacy Act. While industry didn't like that idea, witnesses did agree that the CCPA should be the floor upon which a federal law is built.