Sen. John Kerry said Tuesday that he will join his House colleagues and take a crack at privacy legislation.

"And as a matter of law, we need new baseline standards for privacy protection that ensure people's identity is treated with the respect it deserves," Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement. "Our counterparts in the House have introduced legislation and I intend to work with Senator Pryor and others to do the same on this side with the goal of passing legislation early in the next Congress."

Kerry did not provide details on what his bill might entail. In the House, Reps. Rick Boucher of Virginia and Bobby Rush of Illinois, both Democrats, have introduced legislation which would essentially require that companies be transparent about their data collection processes, among other provisions.

Kerry's announcement came as the Senate Commerce Committee was holding a hearing about online privacy, which included presentations from Apple, Google, Facebook, and others. Nothing particularly enlightening was revealed during the hearing. Senators continued to express befuddlement about how personal information is used online, and the companies present reiterated their stances that personal information is protected and controlled by the user.

Apple's testimony, presented by Guy Tribble, vice president of software technology, was similar to the letter that Bruce Sewell, general counsel and senior vice president of legal and government affairs at Apple, wrote to Reps. Edward Markey and Joe Barton last week in response to the congressmen's questions about Apple location-based services.

"There's a master on-off switch for location-based data [on Apple products] so that the user always has the option from completely opting out from any location data at all," Tribble said when questioned about location services.

He did say, however, that Apple was just getting started with its iAds platform, so the company's iAd policies "may evolve over time as we perhaps innovate new ways to incorporate the control over user's information."

Google, meanwhile, discussed Google Dashboard and its Ads Preference Manager as ways for users to control access to their data.

Many of the senators' questions were directed at Facebook. Chief technology officer Bret Taylor reiterated that people use Facebook to share information, but insisted that Facebook never sells data to third parties or advertisers.