On March 12, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on “GDPR & CCPA: Opt-ins, Consumer Control, and the Impact on Competition and Innovation.” The Committee heard from witnesses representing industry, consumer organizations, and academia, who discussed a broad range of issues to inform a federal privacy law: from meaningful consumer controls to the successes and failures of other privacy frameworks to beefed up enforcement by the FTC . One important topic that was not discussed was the importance of publicly available information and how it should be treated by a federal privacy law. As SIIA explained in recent comments to the Senate, the social benefits and public policy principles promoted by the processing of public data are tangible, indisputable, and balanced. Public data is used to provide choice and access to credit for personal finances, to enable credit for business expansion to grow our economy, and to promote public safety. Moreover, the free flow o ...

I had the opportunity to join Larry Jacobs this morning on Education Talk Radio for a conversation on federal education policy. We talked about the Trump education budget proposal, the goings on at the US Department of Education, and what the Every Student Succeeds Act really means for states and schools.