Ashkan Soltani faces the daunting task of overseeing the first government body in the United States with the sole job of regulating how Google, Facebook, Amazon and other big tech companies collect and use data from millions of people. (via nytimes)
Ashkan Soltani, the head of California’s new online privacy regulator, needed help launching the first agency of its kind in the United States. So he called the state’s Horse Racing Board.
But first the agency has to be built — and Soltani, 47, a privacy expert who once served as the Federal Trade Commission’s top technologist, has to overcome the lack of precedent. So he has reached out to groups not exactly adjacent to what his agency will be, like the racing board and others, for help navigating his new position.
They are filling a vacuum left by Congress. Lawmakers from both parties have long said they would support a national privacy law. But negotiations in Washington have stalled, partly because of a dispute over whether a federal law should supersede state laws. Like California, Colorado and Virginia have enacted privacy laws.
The board began meeting last year to discuss building the Privacy Protection Agency from scratch. In October, it hired Soltani, who has won a Pulitzer Prize, as the agency’s executive director. The effort has attracted global interest. Wojciech Wiewiorowski, the European Data Protection Supervisor, said he spoke with Soltani this year and saw the California agency — with Silicon Valley in its backyard — as a potentially fruitful ally to rein in the tech giants.
Dedicated data protection agencies are the norm in Europe, where they enforce the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation, which mandates how websites can collect data from users. But reviews of how these groups have enforced the law have been mixed. Critics have said European governments lack the resources to take on Google, Amazon and others.