Washington D.C. — A recent Bloomberg Law op-ed by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-CA) highlights why establishing a national data privacy and security standard is an essential first step towards ensuring American AI leadership.

Key excerpts from Chair Rodgers and Rep. Obernolte:

“Artificial intelligence is here to stay. This technology is both exciting and disruptive, offering advancements that could empower people, expand worker productivity, and grow the US economy. We need to ensure America leads in developing standards and deploying this emerging technology. A critical first step toward achieving AI leadership is passing a national data privacy standard."

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“Data powers all of these new tools. The more information companies can feed into their machine learning systems, the smarter those systems can become. Yet a lack of transparency into AI systems and the data used to train them raises serious concerns about how they operate and where they might potentially be abused.” 

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“Guarding against these risks while still enabling America to reap the benefits of AI will be one of the key challenges of our time. Achieving this balance will require a deliberate approach to AI. A national data privacy standard must be the first step. Establishing comprehensive protections on the collection, processing, transfer, and storage of our data should be foundational to AI regulation in Congress. 

“Last year, the Energy and Commerce Committee worked in bipartisan fashion to advance comprehensive data privacy and security legislation, which passed out of the committee with near unanimous support. We’re building on that momentum this Congress. We continue to work toward legislation that would implement the most robust privacy protections to date in the US, putting people back in control of their data.” 

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“By setting clear rules of the road that promote innovation, strengthen protections for people’s data privacy and security, and ensure companies are assessing the safety of their algorithms as AI is deployed, the US will continue to lead on this revolutionary technology.”  

Don’t miss — A national data privacy and security law would put people back in control of their online data by: 

• Restoring Americans’ control over their data 
• Minimizing what data is collected and stored on all Americans, specifically children 
• Requiring assessments of Big Tech’s algorithms and how they harm children 
• Preventing data brokers from selling profiles of Americans, especially when it comes to governments looking to surveil people and violate their civil liberties 

CLICK HERE to read the full op-ed.