The following is adapted from remarks delivered by Kent Walker, President of Global Affairs, at Beyond the Basics: The Many Pillars of U.S. Privacy Law, an event hosted by R Street Institute at The National Press Club in Washington, DC. Google also published an accompanying white paper on Responsible Data Practices.
Information is all around us. Americans sometimes take it for granted, but from the moment we walk out our front doors, information powers everything we do.
After a two-years-and-counting pandemic, when people have taken to tech at an unprecedented pace, they’re more aware of both the possibilities and the privacy challenges.
They may have even heard about the shadowy world of data brokers who buy and sell information to actors they’ve never heard of, for purposes that they can’t see or control, in ways that may risk their privacy and security.
And they may have a greater appreciation for the need for consistency across the country — not a patchwork of 50 different state laws, but a law that organizations and people can rely on as they go about their daily lives
There is a range of views when it comes to technology and technology regulation. But when it comes to national privacy regulation, there is a clear consensus: Americans want it.
A Pew Research poll found that 75 percent of people support government regulation of consumer data.
And the absence of a comprehensive federal privacy law has left a vacuum that states are trying to fill by scrambling to pass their own, often inconsistent, laws — a trend that actually risks fragmenting consumer protections.
People are counting on all of us to address this issue — and fast. The good news is that after many years of discussion, today, there seems to be a growing consensus on this. We are starting to see interest from both parties, from many different constituencies. They are coming together on how to do this well.
President Biden in his State of the Union address highlighted the importance of privacy, and there are growing reports that Congress is making progress toward comprehensive privacy legislation. We’ve long supported that goal, and we welcome the forward movement.
When data is misused, when consumers find their trust is misplaced, it hurts not just the whole digital ecosystem, but the potential for future innovation.
And let me be clear: We at Google get it, and we’ve rethought and adapted our own approaches to product development to promote privacy and security.
For example, because digital services should keep your information for only as long as you find it helpful, we introduced auto-delete controls to let you easily delete your location history, web history, and YouTube history.
Try to do that with any other business that holds data about you.
We were the first platform to make it easy for people to download or transfer personal data when they want to switch to other services.
And today, we keep more people safe online than anyone else in the world — because if it’s not secure, it’s not private.
To set new standards for responsible data use, we’ve also done what we do best – built new technological solutions, investing in privacy-preserving technologies.
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