WPF Discussion Draft: Consumer Privacy and Data Security Standards Act of 2019

The World Privacy Forum has published its discussion draft privacy bill that provides rules of the road for standards setting in the area of data privacy and security. The discussion draft sets forth a pathway to creating voluntary consensus standards to facilitate granular and contextual standard-setting focused on privacy and security issue areas. 

Voluntary consensus standards are not industry self-regulation; they are standards that are rigorously defined and ensure due process and other key fairness and inclusiveness standards have been met throughout the standards setting process. These types of standards have been very successfully used for many years in other contexts, for example, by the FDA. 

The bill draft was co-authored by Jane K. Winn, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law who is the foremost legal scholar in the US, if not the world, on standards and standard setting bodies, and Pam Dixon, Executive Director of the World Privacy Forum, a privacy researcher who has published substantive and original research about the problems and failures of privacy self regulation. The discussion draft was released for public comment and discussion at the FTC’s Competition and Consumer Privacy hearing April 10, 2019. In June 2019, the discussion draft was submitted as part of formal testimony to the US Senate Banking Committee. The co-authors have written a scholarly paper on this topic that has undergone comment and review at the 2019 Privacy Law Scholars Conference.

Read: The Consumer Privacy and Data Security Standards Act of 2019