A Rising Tide Lifts All Consumers: Penumbras of Foreign Data Protection Laws in the United States

With the growth of collecting, processing, and transferring personal information to third parties, consumers’ data is increasingly exposed to a myriad of risks. Perhaps chief among these are the data protection practices of data collectors themselves. Yet despite the risk to consumers, U.S. data protection law has remained fragmented, focused on individual industries at the federal level and only comprehensive, occasionally, at the state level. This lack of a comprehensive data protection law in the United States is a significant detriment to the security of U.S. consumers.

International law also fails to offer a path that could comprehensively protect U.S. consumers.