The United States has not created any meaningful legislation to protect American’s data privacy or usage since the 1970s, despite a bipartisan agreement of the need for such and a model available to work from. This is not lost on Americans, who express simultaneously that they continue to spend more, if not all, of their daily lives online and they feel an immense lack of power to protect themselves. This paper begins to delve into current movement’s towards data privacy legislation, a comparison with the EU’s data privacy model and a brief history of protective laws passed by Congress.
Courtney Beesch is a first semester graduate student in the data analytics and visualization program at the Pratt Institute. She currently works full-time at The Washington Post as an audience editor and is soon moving to a new role on the design team. She moved from Washington, D.C., where she's lived for the past five-years, in January. Alongside her professional work and graduate studies, she also ran the 3K and 5K for Pratt's Track and Field team for the outdoor season.