Privacy legislation: Fair hearing, not attack

Re: “Pro: The Washington Privacy Act empowers consumers to retake control of their identity online in our data-fueled economy” [Feb. 7, Opinion]:

Protecting Washingtonians’ rights of personal privacy is key to our life and democracy, and demands attention among today’s many pressing policy issues.

I appreciate the Legislature addressing this issue. However, I object to Sen. Reuven Carlyle’s claim that objections to Senate Bill 5062 come from “the rigid edges of political ideology.” That’s a demeaning and cynical attack in defense of a bill that is carefully worded to follow current industry practice. SB 5062 doesn’t take the best of other policies and add new rights. It carefully moderates the obligations of those policies to reduce the burden of implementation for industry.

Over the last three years, Washingtonians and advocacy groups including the Tech Equity Coalition, American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, the Consumer Federation of America, Electronic Privacy Information Center and Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out loopholes in prior versions of SB 5062 to Sen. Carlyle, only to be largely ignored. Rather than shout from the sidelines, the Tech Equity Coalition proposed an alternative as House Bill 1433 and asked for a fair hearing. That’s how important laws should be debated, not with dismissive characterizations of Washingtonians asking for their rights to be protected.

Nicholas Gregg Brown, Seattle