Google joins effort to encourage consumer privacy legislation

Google today announced that it has joined the Consumer Privacy legislative Forum (CPL), a group that lobbies for the creation of federal consumer privacy legislation.

"Here in the U.S., we have a growing patchwork quilt of state privacy laws, disparate industry-specific privacy laws (...) and a similarly-mixed bag of data security laws," writes Nicole Wong, associate general counsel for the company in the general Google blog. "This matrix of laws is complex, incomplete, and sometimes contradictory. For consumers, the result is a set of privacy protections that are uneven at best."

The company hopes that federal regulation may bring a coherent, complex and plausible structure of privacy law : "Google strongly supports the adoption of a federal consumer privacy law. It would be good for our users, and would contribute to consumer trust on the Internet as a platform for communication, expression, e-commerce, and so forth," Wong writes.

The CPL includes anumber of other companies such as Ebay, HP, Kodak, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and Symantec.