Privacy Law Differences Law Essay Research Coursework

Privacy Laws – EU vs. the US
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Privacy Laws – EU vs. the US
Differences
The US does not have a singular law to safeguard data privacy but has specific legislation enacted by different states or federal government to protect particular data types. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for the EU, on the other hand, is a data protection framework that places all the data protection laws across Europe under one roof. GDPR emphasizes an individual's rights to data protection rather than the interest of a business, unlike the US privacy laws that seem more interested in the integrity of the data provided by an individual (Beens, 2020). GDPR provides the user with the right to amend wrongly submitted personal information for processing in addition to the common rights of access, delete, and opting out (Barrett, 2019). GDPR also grants the user the liberty to have explicit consent before submitting personal data for processing, a guarantee substituted with a privacy notice by the US privacy laws like California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Lastly, the EU has well-regulated national bodies and authorities tasked with enforcing and protecting GDPR laws. In contrast, the US has no specified body to deal with data protection, as the role is partly dedicated to the FTC. The EU can therefore be said to be better at protecting the privacy of its citizens compared to the US.
US Companies and the GDPR laws
Since the enactment and adoption of GDPR privacy laws by the EU, numerous multinational companies have come under fire for violating the privacy protection laws. US companies have been the major victims. Marriott International Inc. and tech giants Google and Facebook have all faced charges by the EU over GDPR violations.
Marriott International Inc.
The multinational hospitality company faced a class-action lawsuit following the data breach that affected over 500 million users' personal information, 30 million of whom were citizens of the EU (Lomas, 2020). Martin Bryant, the complainant on behalf of the EU citizens, argued throu...