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00:00Michael I want to start out with you what were your big takeaways from the hearings today. I mean are we any closer to agreement between the lawmakers and tech companies on potential legislation. Yeah. This was a very important hearing certainly will not be the last. I do think it says a lot that our members in particular Internet companies are pushing so hard for a national framework to give meaningful control and meaningful transparency to all Americans over their data. You should know who has your information how they're using it. And we're calling on Congress to pass a law that will have a unified standard for our whole country that protects people but also allows for the innovation that has made our internet sector so vibrant here in United States. Now Ben Richard Blumenthal and a few other lawmakers called out these tech company companies for yes supporting very high level ideas but when it actually comes to the bill they'll kill it with their teeth. So do you think these tech companies are actually committed to this process . Well that's something Michael certainly can speak to. I do think the details are going to be really really interesting there are a lot of moments where senators urged the various officials who were testifying to sort of weigh in on a particular issue and they what they often said was maybe or qualified no or qualified yes. You know look this is this is the law and the language matters. And so it's a little bit hard to sort of go into a hearing environment and and toss off an idea and ask someone to weigh in on it or not. But I do think that when it comes to drafting that language there absolutely are going to be a lot of differences of opinion within tech and then also outside of tech that I think are going to be worth watching one of the big ones that I'm watching is definitely going to be enforcement and I do think some of Michael's folks will be talking heavily about about how they want that to look. And now Michael many of the Internet Association companies have been very critical of GDP. And I just want us to take a quick listen to this exchange between a senator and Google about GDP far off him. Any idea on how many human hours it might have taken for Google's workforce to bring the company into compliance with the GDP . We do have some analysis of that that I would be happy to share with your staff sir. I don't have those numbers available with me today. Would you estimate that it was in the thousands of hours. I would estimate that it was in the hundreds of years of human time hundreds of years of human time. Michael what do you make of that. G.D. is very complicated. It's still being implemented and folks are are complying with it particularly our member companies. But it is a very complicated law and one maybe that's not best for innovation or startups. There are many American newspapers for example that have decided they'd had to shut down their websites in Europe even Outback Steakhouse closed their website down in Europe because they couldn't figure out how to comply with it. I mean this is exactly why we need a American approach. We need a federal law here in the United States that shows that we can be leaders in technology but also we can be leaders in privacy protections and we need to get it right the details matter we're behind this one hundred and ten percent and we're already working on text and we're willing to sit down with all lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to make sure this gets done. And now Ben chairman Foon spoke with reporters after the hearing and he spoke about data security . What did you learn. Well he said as we've known that data security has been really difficult data security has been legislation's been being negotiated really for several years . It's come out over a couple of Congresses. This is interesting because security is one of the issues that we've heard you know as we've gotten the sort of consensus from industry just over the last days and weeks that security has to be a big part of this. So I think that's another issue that I'm going to be watching. Where companies within tech and then companies outside of tech are going to be really talking pretty strenuously about what it means to have security and especially who has the burden for that and then what it looks like if that goes wrong. Now Michael almost all of the privacy proposals that have been floated by the tech community suggest that a federal legislation should preempt the California state privacy law. So what are the key flaws that they see in this California data privacy law. Well a couple of things. One people's expectation of privacy doesn't change as you cross from state to state and it doesn't make sense if you're driving or flying across the country to kick into brand new privacy laws as you go from border to border or if you're face timing with your grandmother and another state to have the two of you be under different privacy laws. I don't think makes a lot of sense as it relates to California law. They just got it wrong. This is something they pushed through. I mean a very short period of time GDP are as complicated as it took two years to draft and implement. California did it in days. And also there are things in the California law that we think make people less private and less safe. There are provisions in the law that prohibit companies from anonymous using and identifying information you can't aggregate information that's not associate with people to meet the requirements of the law. And I think that's something that's flawed and we can do a better job. We should have a state of the art best in class best in the world privacy law that protects all 50 states and not a piecemeal approach. Ben what's your take on what Michael just said consumer advocates have a very different perspective about the California data privacy law and the role that state should play in this conversation. Yeah absolutely . A lot of them would like to defend tougher state laws. You know if states want to go strict they say you know there's no reason we should stop that. Increasingly what I'm hearing out of the consumers is that they want the federal law to essentially be a baseline but it's something that the states can go over and above. I do expect that there will be another point of tension not so much within industry but between industry and the consumer point of view. I think it's important to note that this was an industry hearing but the Chairman John Thune said that there would be an early October hearing with consumer advocates including somebody who was ousted McTaggart a real estate developer who was kind of behind that privacy law that went into effect in California .

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The Big Takeaways From Tech's Privacy Hearing on Capitol Hill

Michael Beckerman, chief executive officer of The Internet Association, discusses the takeaways from the congressional hearing over safeguards for data privacy with Bloomberg's Selina Wang and Ben Brody on "Bloomberg Technology." (Source: Bloomberg)

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