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Day two of DLA Piper's Global Technology Summit event kicked off Wednesday with a panel on technology, law and public policy, featuring in-house lawyers from GoPro and Sophos.

GoPro Inc. general counsel Eve Saltman, Sophos Inc. general counsel Eleanor Lacey and Nicholas Burns, a senior counselor for The Cohen Group and former U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs, discussed changing international laws, breach disclosures and how legal departments can self-regulate in a time of regulatory uncertainty.

“It's often up to companies to do the right things for their consumers. In the U.S. we've had a balance of self-regulation and government regulation,” Saltman said. “And self-regulation has worked really well in many industries. Maybe that's not true for data privacy.”

While the General Data Protection Regulation has set the standard for data privacy laws in the European Union, companies still face a patchwork of regulations in the U.S. Saltman and Burns said it's currently hard to predict what long-term federal data privacy regulation will look like in the U.S.

In the U.K., where Sophos is headquartered, Lacey said GDPR has clarified some regulatory confusion. While some regulation, if done incorrectly, may hamper a company, Lacey said that “understanding what you're supposed to be doing or not doing is very helpful.”

Saltman expressed concern that U.S. regulators may rush into new laws around artificial intelligence and other emerging, data-fueled tech without fully understanding companies' data collection and usage.

“We really don't want regulators to start creating regulations for AI without understanding it,” Saltman said. “So it is on us to help educate, embrace our regulators, encourage them to practice regulatory humility and hope that partnership results in regulations that prevent the unintended consequences of technology but also help innovation thrive.”

Moderator Sally Shin, CNBC's San Francisco bureau chief, also asked the panelists about Google's decision not to disclose a breach of social media platform Google+ discovered this March, a decision made in part because the company did not believe the breach seriously harmed consumers.

The lawyers did not comment specifically on whether Google made the best choice, but did say that such a decision factors in legal obligation and what information was exposed.

“What I can say as a general counsel is you will get many different things when you decide whether or not to report. Sometimes you're looking at the rules for whether or not you need to report,” Lacey said. “There are other times when companies choose to report when they don't need to because they feel it does protect customer interest.”