Phil Lee writes:
As an EU privacy professional working in the US, one of the things that regularly fascinates me is each continent’s misperception of the other’s privacy rules. Far too often have I heard EU privacy professionals (who really should know better) mutter something like “The US doesn’t have a privacy law” in conversation; equally, I’ve heard US colleagues talk about the EU’s rules as being “nuts” without understanding the cultural sensitivities that drive European laws.
So I thought it would be worth dedicating a few lines to compare and contrast the different regimes, principally to highlight that, yes, they are indeed different, but, no, you cannot draw a conclusion from these differences that one regime is “better” (whatever that means) than the other. You can think of what follows as a kind of brief 101 in EU/US privacy differences.
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