Since @senatecommerce has released all witness testimony, opening statements, and questions, I thought I would do a thread about the recurring themes I was seeing emerge. https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2020/4/enlisting-big-data-in-the-fight-against-coronavirus

First, and foremost, everyone is in agreement that #BigData and #tech are going to be necessary for fighting the coronavirus. Now exactly what data and which tech is another story...

And second, we need comprehensive federal privacy legislation. Now as a privacy advocate, I completely agree with that sentiment, but when witnesses are putting out Privacy for America's model bill as the solution I'm a bit skeptical about us all wanting the same thing.

As for the questions, they could be broken into 5 major buckets:

1) What privacy protections are already in place for consumer data? And are those protections enough?

Now this questions was sliced and diced by data type, but the underlying thought remained the same

2) What is anonymization? How about aggregation? Re-identification?

There were tons of different questions about anonymization and aggregation of data, ease of re-identification, and data's usefulness in that state. This, to me, felt like the committee searching for definitions.

3) How is data-sharing happening?

The committee wanted to get a handle on how data shared with the government and if it's easy to do. This seemed to be driven not by transparency, but a concern that governments wouldn't have access to the data they need to address the crisis.

That isn't to say the committee was completely unconcerned with private companies sharing data with the government without any guardrails, but there was definitely support for data-sharing for the public's benefit.

4) If we use tech to fight coronavirus, who will be left behind?

The adoption of technology is not even. Those who have smartphones, IOT devices, etc. are often white, affluent, and urban. And if the government only gets data from people with access to that kind of technology...

It means that large swaths of the population will be forgotten about in the pandemic response.

And no, the answer is not to just buy a whole bunch of smart thermometers and hand them out to people. (I'm looking at you Kinsa)

5) Has anyone else solved these problems?

The committee wanted something, anything, that the witnesses could point to that leveraged tech and data to make a meaningful difference in dealing with the pandemic while also protecting privacy.

Now we won't get answers from witnesses until Tuesday, but having the testimony and questions to digest is nice. I know there are drawbacks to paper hearings (hard to follow-up and challenge witnesses, repetition of questions), but I may actually prefer this format.