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Manufacturers are committed to developing innovative products that change lives—while also ensuring consumer privacy, the NAM told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Privacy Working Group this week. 
 
What’s going on: The NAM made several recommendations to the working group regarding the implementation of a comprehensive federal data privacy and security framework.  

• “Manufacturers’ interest in privacy is twofold,” NAM Managing Vice President of Policy Charles Crain said. “First, manufacturers … transform the manufacturing process with the latest technologies, such as artificial intelligence, and personal data continues to be a critical input into and byproduct of these evolutions. Second, manufacturers are entrusted with vast amounts of personal data through their comprehensive and connected relationships with consumers, customers and suppliers [and] recognize their critical responsibility to safeguard privacy.”
• They also believe that a “comprehensive national privacy law that avoids frivolous litigation would make a major contribution” to privacy rights and consumer confidence while helping bring goods to market, he said. 

Kentucky as a model: The NAM urged Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY) and Vice Chairman John Joyce (R-PA) to look to Kentucky’s state privacy law as a model for a federal rule. 

• Kentucky’s law uses several “key definitions” that should be adopted in a federal version, the NAM said, including those of “controller,” “processor,” “third party,” “personal data,” “sensitive data” and others.  

Keep small businesses in mind: The NAM urges “Congress [to] be mindful of the heavy compliance burden that a privacy law may impose on small businesses. Notably, the overwhelming majority of manufacturers are small and medium-sized companies, which are particularly affected by regulatory burdens.”  
 
Innovation and customer service: Privacy law can both protect consumers and allow businesses to use personal data “for all the legitimate, consumer-protective, innovative and value-creative uses of personal data that entrepreneurs, using advances in technologies and business models, have conceived or will conceive of,” the NAM said. 
 
AI: AI-specific regulations should be avoided in the federal privacy rule, Crain told the working group. 

• “Most uses of AI correspond to tasks and objectives that industry has faced for a long time and that are thus highly likely to already be subject to generally applicable regulations,” he said.  

Accountability: The exclusive authority to enforce the privacy law should be given to the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general, the NAM continued. By contrast, creating a private right of action would only lead to frivolous litigation. 
 
Safeguarding consumers’ information: Manufacturers “support the state model’s requirement to ‘establish, implement and maintain reasonable administrative, technical and physical data security practices to protect the confidentiality, integrity and accessibility of personal data. The data security practices shall be appropriate to the volume and nature of the personal data at issue.’” 
 
The final say: “Manufacturers support strong privacy protections for individuals within a single national legal framework that allows businesses to use personal information for legitimate and innovative purposes and does not lead to frivolous litigation,” Crain wrote in a social post Wednesday.