3C’s Boston Roundtable: We’ve Got Our Heads (And Storage) in the “Cloud”
This week, Senator Warren’s Regional Director Ariel Vega Jr. joined from the Boston area for a roundtable luncheon on the positive impact of digital tools, platforms and marketplaces for local small businesses.
Led by 3C’s own Rob Ellsworth and Small Business Roundtable Co-Executive Director John Stanford, conversation hit on a variety of opportunities and challenges facing Boston’s digitally-enabled small businesses, including:
- The challenges that data privacy laws (like the California Consumer Privacy Act) present to small businesses, including compliance costs and unintentional breaches;
- In-platform data-privacy security, like Google’s built-in privacy controls;
- External and cloud-based storage options like G-Suite and Dropbox that can help manage and securely store data;
- Platforms’ compliance with Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards.
- Concerns over antitrust probes at the state and federal levels – namely, how they could affect cost, accuracy, and availability of digital tools and marketplaces that small businesses rely on.
We are grateful for the opportunity to connect with and hear from small businesses who saw digital offerings like G-Suite as integral to complying with burdensome data privacy regulation. We encourage Congress to listen to small business concerns and support data privacy and competition policy that supports the digital economy instead of threatening it.
