Will the USA adopt EU GDPR-like laws?

[Travis]

I know how liberal the USA are, and how businesses come first there, but it's been some years, that there are constant scandals regarding private data collection, usage, violation, exploitation, stealing, etc... So I wonder if, the USA will, at some point, decide to regulate this wild jungle that the Internet has become and if they could start adopting laws inspired from the EU GDPR.

Even if the GDPR concerns only European citizens' data, it applies to all businesses around the World. It would seems a natural process, if this is being adopted by all countries progressively. If a business processes European data in one day, and data from other people another way, this is quickly becoming hard to manage. The easier would be to process data the same way for everybody, instead of having to maintain two systems.

[jimh009]

I think the answer to your question is yes....but not anytime soon. Certainly not going to happen in our current environment. But if Democrats take back full control of government in 2020, perhaps something like the EU GDPR could happen. Already several states are looking into the idea - so this could be something that happens at state level first before being, however grudgingly, adopted by the federal government.

But, like I said, it is years away.

[keyplyr]

I know how liberal the USA are, and how businesses come first there

'Businesses coming first' is a conservative mantra. Liberals stand for people's rights coming first.

But I agree with jimh009. Under the current gov't administration, basic privacy protection is years away, most likely when the administration & congress are under Democratic control again.

[lucy24]

'Businesses coming first' is a conservative mantra. Liberals stand for people's rights coming first.

Words have different meanings in different places. I think here “liberal” meant “laissez-faire”, which in turn has much to do with what in the US is called “libertarian”.

:: pause here to synchronize chronometers and start counting ::

[keyplyr]

Yeah lucy24, I see you point.

Looking at the EU's "protections" sometimes seems a bit extreme for us Americans, even those of us who consider ourselves a liberals.

[Travis]

Liberalism, the ideological belief in organizing the economy on individualist lines, such that the greatest possible number of economic decisions are made by private individuals and not by collective institutions

This is when the State is trying to interfere and regulate the very minimum.

Under the current gov't administration, basic privacy protection is years away,

Excepting if they want to divert the attention away from gun and NRA things.

[tangor]

The US actually has some powerful privacy laws in place, however, these can be abridged by contracts (I AGREE, etc) that few users ever read. Will these laws be strengthened? That's the current debate which has become enlarged during the current FB data privacy fiasco in the news.

[Travis]

"Scams, Lies, And Revenge #*$!: In the Facebook Fallout, Will The U.S. Get New Privacy Laws?"
[forbes.com...]