Julie Brill, vice president and deputy general counsel for privacy and regulatory affairs of Microsoft. Courtesy photo. Julie Brill, vice president and deputy general counsel for privacy and regulatory affairs of Microsoft. Courtesy photo.

Microsoft's top privacy lawyer reflected on the global impact of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation and its lessons for U.S. legislators in a blog post Monday.

The post from Julie Brill, Microsoft's deputy general counsel for global privacy and regulatory affairs, comes as GDPR hits its first anniversary on May 25. Brill said the law “improved how companies handle their customers' personal data” and sparked privacy legislation changes or proposals in Brazil, China, India, Japan, South Korea and Thailand. 

Those changes have also come to the U.S., where California became the first state to pass a privacy law and federal legislators are debating nationwide regulation. Brill said the California Consumer Privacy Act, which goes into effect in January 2020, includes “rights inspired by GDPR” and is a good starting point for a federal law that “should go further” in protecting consumer data.

“Now, it's Congress's turn to adopt a new framework that reflects the changing understanding of the right to privacy in the United States and around the world,” Brill said in Monday's post.

A federal U.S. bill could take lessons from GDPR she said, with “rules that give people control over their data and require greater accountability and transparency in how companies use the personal information they collect.”

She suggested federal law require companies assess “the benefits of data processing against potential privacy risks” rather than placing the burden on consumers with an opt-in or opt-out privacy model.

“Strong federal privacy should not only empower consumers to control their data, it also should place accountability obligations on the companies that collect and use sensitive personal information,” Brill said.

That accountability should be backed up with ”strong enforcement provisions” from the Federal Trade Commission, Brill added. She previously served as an FTC commissioner, an experience she said taught her current law doesn't allow the agency to adequately protect privacy.

At the International Association of Privacy Professionals' Global Privacy Summit earlier this month, current FTC chairman Joseph Simons said the agency would also need a resource boost if a federal privacy law were enacted. The FTC now has 40 employees focused on privacy, compared with around 140 at the Irish Data Protection Commission and 500 at the U.K.'s Information Commissioner's Office, which enforce GDPR.

Aligning U.S. and EU privacy law and enforcement strategies could make compliance simpler for global companies, Brill added. In hearings on a U.S. federal privacy law, legislators have raised concerns that compliance could come with a hefty price tag that harms competition.

“For American businesses, interoperability between U.S. law and GDPR will reduce the cost and complexity of compliance by ensuring that companies don't have to build separate systems to meet differing—and even conflicting requirements—for privacy protection in the countries where they do business,” she said.

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