There’s been a lot of attention and questions about consumer privacy in recent days. At Comcast, we respect and protect our customers’ personal information. Always have, always will. We do not sell our broadband customers’ individual Web browsing history. We did not do it before the FCC’s rules were adopted, and we have no plans to do so.

Comcast has committed to privacy principles that are consistent with the FTC’s privacy regime, which has applied to all entities in the Internet ecosystem for over 20 years and which continues to apply to Internet edge companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. We believe this commitment is legally enforceable in multiple ways, including by state attorneys general.

There has been a lot of misleading talk about how the congressional action this week to overturn the regulatory overreach of the prior FCC will now permit us to sell sensitive customer data without customers’ knowledge or consent. This is just not true. In fact, we have committed not to share our customers’ sensitive information (such as banking, children’s and health information), unless we first obtain their affirmative, opt-in consent.

Our privacy commitments to our customers go even beyond this protection of sensitive information that has dominated the dialogue this week. If a customer does not want us to use other, non-sensitive data to send them targeted ads, we offer them the ability to opt out of receiving such targeted ads.

We also continue to comply with various federal laws protecting privacy, such as the Communications Act, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, as well as dozens of state privacy and data-security laws.

In view of all the misinformation and inaccurate statements that have been made in the last week, we want to make sure that our customers understand how strong our privacy protections really are. So we will revise our privacy policy to make more clear and prominent that, contrary to the many inaccurate statements and reports, we do not sell our customers’ individual Web browsing information to third parties and that we do not share sensitive information unless our customers have affirmatively opted in to allow that to occur.

Gerard Lewis is the senior vice president, deputy general counsel and chief privacy officer for Comcast.

Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa.) pulled an Electronic Communications Privacy Act update bill from the committee's markup agenda Thursday (June 9) after "poison pill" amendments threatened to expand the bill into areas that neither of its co-sponsors wanted it to go.

The baseline bill, which passed the House 419 to zero, would provide protections for cloud storage by requiring a probable cause warrant for accessing information in the cloud, and extending the protections for e-mails stored over 180 days (currently no warrant is required to access those).

It was scheduled to be marked up -- amended (or not) and voted out of committee --Thursday, but its co-sponsors. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), ranking member of the committee, requested it be pulled rather than allow it to be amended, which they argued would decrease privacy protections.

It was bumped from an earlier markup in hopes that a clean bill could emerge, but that did not happen. 

Leahy pointed out that their bill was both a bipartisan and bicameral compromise. He said if the poison pill amendments were added, he doubted the bill would pass the Senate and certainly would not pass the House, which would have to re-vote any changes to the bill it already passed unanimously.

Leahy helped write the original ECPA law, and said no one anticipated the way communications would be transmitted and stored. He said the bill would tank if controversial amendments were injected and he would hate to see that.

He said he would continue to work with his colleagues and said he hoped the bill could still be passed.

"I hope discussions continue to try to move forward with it," Grassley said. "It seems to me there are large areas of consensus, and it should be possible to reach a compromise that a large majority of the committee can support.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), author of one of the amendments identified as a poison pill, said he supports warrants for content, but defended his amendment -- on national security letters allowing the FBI to access content -- saying it was highly targeted and hardly a poison pill, given that it "enjoyed the support of the majority of the committee."

The Cornyn amendment was opposed by Google, Yahoo! and others, who said the amendment would unduly expand FBI surveillance powers.

“It’s disappointing that the important reforms contained in ECPA have been derailed by a handful of senators who are trying to use this vital legislation to undermine Americans’ privacy by expanding the FBI’s ability to access communications without a warrant," said Adam Brandon, CEO of FreedomWorks, a small government, free market group.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has held over consideration of legislation updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) after amendments were offered that could have undone a compromise approach.

Similar legislation, the E-Mail Privacy Act, passed unanimously in the House, and supporters were hoping for clean passage in the Senate as well.

The bill updates ECPA to require the government to get a probable cause criminal warrant to access e-mails, social media posts and other online content stored in the cloud by Internet service providers and other e-mail service providers, like Google. In a nod to the longevity of cloud storage, it eliminates the 180-day sunset on stored communications. Previously a warrant was not required for communications stored beyond 180 days.

During a business meeting to mark up a Senate version Thursday (May 26), committee chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) agreed to hold over the bill rather than press the issue with a vote, pointing out that the bill's sponsors had asked that it be held over.

Ranking member Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), one of those sponsors, thanked Grassley for the move.

But Grassley said there was broad consensus that the 1986 ECPA bill needed revising given the advances in technology. He said that most agree that given the way email is used and stored it hardly makes sense for its protection to hinge on whether it is 180 days old or whether it has been opened at all.

"The privacy of Americans should be protected," he said, and should not depend on [an] email's age at all."

Leahy, who wrote much of the original bill, said he agreed it needed to be updated.

"Digital files ought to be treated the same as the papers in our filing cabinets in our homes," Leahy said. He pointed to the House passage 419 to 0, adding that the Senate should "give some attention to that, given that there are those who thought that neither body could pass a unanimous resolution that the sun rises in the east."

Leahy pointed to the broad support, but also pointed to last-minute concerns, expressed in Republican amendments, and said he supported delaying moving the bill to the floor in the interests of preserving the broad coalition -- "from the right to the left" -- rather than see it "destroyed."

Not to pass the bill, he said, "would be an enormous mistake and turning our back on the tremendous work both parties did in the House..."

Several amendments had been proposed over the past few days by Republicans, including one by Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the International Communications Privacy Act (ICPA), that would have addressed government surveillance outside the U.S. by securing data privacy internationally.

ICPA would reign in what Hatch called the overreach of law enforcement's ability to access data worldwide.

"Currently, the U.S. government takes the position that it can compel a technology company to turn over data located anywhere in the world belonging to a citizen of any company so long as the data can be accessed by a company subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

Hatch did not introduce the amendment, but did introduce it as a standalone bill. Grassley said he was making no promises, but would see how that bill "fit into" the committee's agenda.