After California passed the most sweeping online privacy law in the nation this summer, big tech went back to the state legislature to weaken it. While that effort fizzled before the end of the state’s legislative session, a more insidious strategy emerged this week: going around California and appealing to Congress.

Alastair Mactaggart, who led the California effort, told The Intercept that a Wednesday hearing in Congress left him concerned that Congress might pre-empt the state legislation at the behest of giant tech firms.

“Tech has had zero regulation,” Mactaggart said in an interview. “For them it’s been this Wild West of being able to monetize information any which way. They will pull out all the stops to try to get back to where they were.”

Mactaggart, a Bay Area real estate developer, became an unlikely activist when he bankrolled a ballot measure that, among other things, would require tech companies to reveal what personal information they collected on users, allow users to opt out of the sale of their data to third parties, and impose fines for data breaches. Tech firms fought it vigorously, but were hampered by a series of scandals like Facebook’s release of data to Cambridge Analytica, and widespread popular support for some limits on persistent surveillance.

Tech firms, fearing being locked into a policy they could only change at the ballot, encouraged the state legislature to get involved. The California House and Senate passed a law substantially similar to the initiative, with unanimous support in both chambers. Gov. Jerry Brown signed it in June.

The law doesn’t take effect until January 2020, and big tech’s hope was to water it down before that date. Industry representatives went to Congress this week after failing to get California lawmakers to narrow the definition of “selling” data, which would have rendered some of the protections of the law moot.

The Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on Wednesday where leaders of six tech and telecom companies — Amazon, Google, Apple, Twitter, AT&T, and Charter Communications — endorsed a federal consumer privacy standard. In their conception, this would pre-empt any state data protection laws.

It’s an eerie echo of the federal pre-emption that Wall Street banks received and used to great effect during the run-up to the housing bubble. In 2002, Georgia passed an anti-predatory lending law, and both the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ruled that banks they regulated simply did not have to comply with it. This created a chilling effect, as states declined to crack down on the rampant fraud in the mortgage industry. And the financial crisis was the result.

At the hearing, the companies criticized the California statute, in particular its definition of “personal information,” which they consider overbroad. Amazon vice president Andrew DeVore called the statute “confusing and difficult to comply with,” adding that it “may actually undermine important privacy-protective practices.” Alone among the witnesses, Apple’s Bud Tribble did say that while federal legislation should pre-empt state law, it must also “meet the bar of protecting consumers meaningfully.” However, he did not elaborate on what that protection should entail.

