Law Commons^™

The Changing Face Of Privacy Protection In The European Union And The United States, Fred H. Cate

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Among the wide variety of national and multinational legal regimes for protecting privacy, two dominant models have emerged, reflecting two very different approaches to the control of information. The European Union has enacted a sweeping data protection directive that imposes significant restrictions on most data collection, processing, dissemination, and storage activities, not only within Europe, but throughout the world if the data originates in a member state. The United States has taken a very different approach that extensively regulates government processing of data, while facilitating private, market-based initiatives to address private sector data processing.

Under the EU data protection directive, …