The European Union general data protection regulation: What it is and what it means
Donald MacKenzie · Cookies, Pixels and Fingerprints · LRB 1 April 2021
A Relational Turn for Data Protection?
Congress Might Pass an Actually Good Privacy Bill
US State Privacy Legislation Tracker
<aside> 💡 “WTF is GDPR?” by Lomas give such a good summary of the legislation’s main strengths: enforcement of financial penalties, expanding the definition of personal data and further categorization of it, privacy by design as a legal requirement, a suite of consent rights, a universal standard for data breach disclosures, and a human review of AI.
What I worry about is that the ‘Californian Ideology’ still drives the fast-paced tech industry while the U.S. government plays catch up in enforcing stricter regulations on data privacy issues. The amount of hate speech that has exponentially rocketed off thanks to Elon is just the latest example of poor regulation of the industry. The tech industry moves so quickly that, in MacKenzie’s “Cookies, Pixels and Fingerprints”, “these [data protection law and competition law] leave crucial issues largely untouched, such as the way in which indiscriminate digital advertising can inadvertently fund hate speech, or the dependence of so much of serious journalism on revenue from online advertising.”
While reading “ The European Union general data protection regulation” by Hoofnagle, van der Sloot and Zuiderveen, I thought their compare-and-contrast between the EU and U.S. privacy laws was insightful. In their histories, we can see the fork in the road of how they treat FIPs differently and how quickly (or not in the case of the U.S.) they react to their own shortcomings.
At least we can look towards new developments in the discourse around data protection in the U.S. Richards and Hartzog question if the data protection regime’s focus on data is too narrow and then offer a definition of “relational turn in privacy law” that primarily focuses on information relationships (Hartzog really loves to define things). Even more recently, Edelman in “Don’t Look Now, but Congress Might Pass an Actually Good Privacy Bill” explores the ADPPA and the cautious optimism around it. “‘You’re looking at a situation where you have bicameral, bipartisan support, with Republicans and Democrats on board on the House and Senate side,’ says Butler. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever been this close.’”
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