On Wednesday, lawmakers and tech executives sat down on Capitol Hill and talked data privacy. As more and more personal data ends up online, and it is less and less clear how that data is being used by whom and for what, lawmakers and users are right to be concerned. Those concerns, however, must not prevent companies and researchers from having access to the large data sets necessary for innovation. Key to keeping data flowing is keeping users’ trust through transparency, and companies must make that a priority.

Fueling concerns on data privacy are revelations, like those recently released in a recent research paper, that users really don’t know, or have control over, how their personal data is being used.