Data Protection Law And Policy In The USA: An Overview

M. Sushant Murthy, LL.M. in Intellectual Property and Technology Law, Jindal Global Law School

ABSTRACT

The advent of globalization in the modern era has brought with it a distinct set of challenges in the form of cybercrime and data breaches. Recent instances of cyber-attacks and loss of personal information on a global scale, such as that of Facebook in 2021, the CAM4 breach in March 2020 and the Yahoo! Data breach of 2017 have opened the eyes of both consumers and data collectors about the necessity of maintaining adequate data protection processes and compliance with data protection norms. With the magnitude of data being collected, shared, and processed on a day-to-day basis, norms such as the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) in the European Union, and the proposed Data Protection Bill of India, seek to uphold the rights of citizens regarding their sensitive personal information. This paper seeks to shed a light on the various policies for Data Protection and Privacy in the United States of America at the Federal and State Levels.