Testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on privacy
By: Eric Gundersen
Today, Tom Lee, who leads Policy at Mapbox, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee on privacy.
It was an honor to watch Tom stand up in front of the Senators and explain how Mapbox is in the business of selling maps, not information about the people using them.
Our success proves that you can grow a business and protect user privacy. A strong national privacy standard should do the same: Uphold the responsibility to put user privacy first while enabling secure, ethical data collection which adds value for users and builders.
This was the core of our message to the Senate Judiciary Committee in testimony at “GDPR & CCPA: Opt-ins, Consumer Control, and the Impact on Competition and Innovation.” It’s an honor to put our story alongside testimony from Google, Intel, and others and to speak on behalf of our community of employees and users, for whom getting questions like this right is a priority.
We work to minimize the information we collect. We anonymize what we do collect, and take additional steps to prevent re-identification. We require customers to let users opt out. We encrypt data in transit and at rest. We apply strong access control policies. And we only use the data to make our products better. Our users benefit from our maps, and we benefit from their use. Offering good privacy practices is the right thing to do. And it’s also good for business.
New regulations inevitably carry costs and risks, especially for smaller businesses. Getting big issues like privacy on solid ground now is imperative to continue growing and serving our users — more than 520 million people per month, globally. We believe that our nation’s privacy laws should be strong and that they should be unified: we favor a single national standard. A jumble of state privacy laws risks creating loopholes, oversights, and errors.
Along with the respect for user privacy built into the core of our products, we have a responsibility to shape the dialogue around these issues with stories gained from our experience. I hope we can help set a high bar for the future of privacy regulation in America.
People, privacy, and business was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.