House Debates Uniform Privacy Law

Computerworld - Washington
U.S. businesses face a patchwork of privacy laws, but that may be better than having to write a single, uniform law to handle all privacy concerns, a House subcommittee was told last week by a panel of privacy experts and some of its own members.
The House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, which has been examining the adequacy of privacy laws in the U.S., turned its attention to the 30 federal statutes and many more state rules covering the issue and asked the question, "Would businesses and consumers be better off with one comprehensive law?"
The current assemblage of laws creates problems for some businesses, said Michael Lamb, chief privacy officer at AT&T Corp., in his testimony before the panel.
"The costs are substantial," said Lamb, who noted that in dealing with a customer using multiple services, such as wireless, cable and telephony, the company has to restrict its internal use of wireless data in one way and cable data in another way to meet various privacy rules.
"We have not heard consumers telling us that they want us to tie our hands internally to any great extent on what we do with their data, but in [meeting] compliance with these statutes, we have to do exactly that," Lamb said.
But he also acknowledged that a uniform law covering all industries would be difficult to develop, except for some "high-level principles," such as agreeing to disclose to consumers how their data is used.
U.S. privacy laws are aimed at regulated industries, principally in areas such as medicine, finance and telecommunications, and are typically developed in response to specific problems.
The Video Privacy Act, for example, was enacted to protect the confidentiality of people who rent videos.

Read more about privacy in Computerworld's Privacy Knowledge Center.