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Chair opens hearing on Secure Data Act, urges national privacy standard
Summary
The chair opened a legislative hearing on the Secure Data Act, saying the bill would create a uniform national privacy standard to protect consumers and provide regulatory certainty to businesses; the chair also thanked Dr. Joyce for leading the committee's privacy working group.
The Chair opened the hearing on federal comprehensive privacy reform and introduced the Secure Data Act as a proposal to establish a national standard for consumer data protections and regulatory certainty for businesses. "The Secure Data Act takes the best ideas of the state privacy laws and incorporates many of the ideas developed over the past several years," the Chair said, adding that a uniform law would protect consumers and support innovation.
The Chair said protections currently depend on a consumer's state of residence and called the patchwork of state mandates "unacceptable," particularly for the millions of Americans who live in states without comprehensive privacy laws. He framed the bill as balancing meaningful consumer protections with a consistent national standard that would help businesses, large and small, navigate digital innovation.
The Chair praised the work of the committee's privacy working group and said, "I would like to thank Dr. Joyce for leading the committee's privacy working group and all the working group members and their staff for their efforts today." He described the group's task as finding consensus between consumer safeguards and business certainty and said their work has laid an "important foundation" for the discussion.
The hearing opened with the Chair urging bipartisan cooperation and stakeholder engagement to advance what he called "the strongest bill possible." He concluded his opening remarks and yielded back the balance of his time.
