Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is a major proponent of the the recent European data regulation GDPR, which came into force in May 2018.
"My own point of view on GDPR is it's a fantastic start on really treating privacy as a human right," Nadella said in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday.
"I'm hopeful that in the United States we will have something that is along the same lines," he said.
Nadella isn't the only big tech CEO to back an American version of GDPR — Apple's Tim Cook has called for federal regulation of data hoarding.
Microsoft's president Brad Smith also made privacy a talking point at Davos this year, describing 2018 as a "watershed" for the tech industry, and adding that new US federal privacy laws are inevitable.
Nadella didn't limit his call for data regulation to the US.
"In fact I will hope that the world over, we all converge on a common standard. One of the things we do not want to do is fragment the world and increase transaction costs, because ultimately it's going to be born in our economic figures," he said.
"I hope we all come together, the Unites States and Europe first, and China. All the three regions will have to come together and set a global standard," he added.
At the same time, Microsoft has reportedly been part of lobbying efforts to shape any future federal legislation approaching GDPR.
Along with Facebook, Google, and IBM, Microsoft "aggressively lobbied" Whitehouse officials to put in place a more lenient set of federal rules than those passed in California in June, according to a New York Times report from August 2018.
