Megan Brown Quoted in Media Coverage of SXSW Panel on Consumer Privacy Rules

March 13, 2019

Megan L. Brown, partner in Wiley Rein’s Privacy & Cybersecurity and Telecom, Media & Technology practices, spoke on a consumer privacy panel at the 2019 SXSW conference, and her comments were covered by Inside Cybersecurity and Government Technology. In light of privacy legislation recently enacted in California, the March 9 panel in Austin, Texas, looked at whether the federal government or states should regulate consumer data privacy.

The inability to navigate disparate data policies in the many jurisdictions where companies do business can lead to legal problems and stand in the way of positive progress, said Ms. Brown, as reported by Government Technology. She added that overly prescriptive legislation could limit future data use. “Data that a company collects today might have a really amazing use in the future that we can’t predict,” Ms. Brown said.

In her view, the federal government could provide the most guidance in the areas of liability and enforcement, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general would be logical choices for enforcement.

The FTC “would be able to be more flexible than a government creating a statute, and that is one of the concerns, once you put something into the United States Code, it’s harder to change down the road, Ms. Brown said, as quoted by Inside Cybersecurity. “I think a lot of people are saying, push this to the Federal Trade Commission, because they can be more flexible over time as technology changes.”

The Government Technology article can be found here.

The Inside Cybersecurity article can be found here (subscription required).