Welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of E-Sharp magazine.

Go to e-sharp.e.U. for free access to all our podcast a date. This is Paul Adamson,

and I'm in conversation with Senator Marsha Blackburn. Senator Marshall Blackburn is

Senator for Tennessee in the U.S. Senate,

and he's about to give a keynote address at Forum Global's Data Privacy Conference here in

Washington, D.C. Senator, thank you very much for doing this today. I'd like to talk to you,

first of all, about your new position as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Tech Task Force.

What is the genesis of this new task force?

Indeed. Chairman Graham, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, said, you know, we need to do a deeper

dive into some of the issues around Big Tech, looking at privacy and data security, competition,

antitrust, prioritization in censorship, transparency.

So we decided instead of doing a traditional subcommittee that the appropriate thing to do

was to establish a task force that would help us move to a good in-depth conversation. And we've been so pleased

with the participation from industry and from our members. We've been able to hear from

people like Airbnb and Match and Mozilla and different privacy officers, different CEOs, and look at how they in their companies are addressing the concerns of online consumers when it comes to privacy and security and fairness in the platform.

Do you personally position yourself as part of the debate in favor of a federal-wide

data privacy rule here in the United States?

I do. I think that it is time for us to do light-touch regulation.

When I was in the House, I chaired the data security and privacy working group.

And we started on this issue seven years ago.

And what we have come to realize is that consumers want the way to protect their virtual

you, as I call it, their presence online.

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