Breaches of personal information on the massive scale seen in the US never happen in Europe because “every other Western country has a comprehensive set of national privacy laws and an office of data protection, led by a privacy commissioner.” So writes Eric Dash for this morning’s New York Times. Quite simply, it’s illegal in the EU for personal information to be used for any purpose other than that for which it was originally collected.
Dash notes a fundamental cultural divide over the concept of privacy itself:
“In broad terms, the United States looks at privacy largely as a consumer and an economic issue; in the rest of the developed world, it is regarded as a fundamental right.”
And therein lies our problem here in the US. Here, the only time personal information is protected is when it’s either beneficial or expedient for commercial enterprises to do so. Dash uses the example of the US telecommunications industry. In the mid-1990s, the national telephone companies sided with privacy advocates because it was in the telco’s best interest to keep phone and billing information from their regional carrier competitors. A decade earlier, France kept phone records private not out of commercial concerns but out of a basic respect for individual privacy rights.
As a result the US has developed the world’s largest personal information collection industry—an industry that simply would not be tolerated in the EU.
Strong privacy rights in Europe began to form in the early 1970s when there was “still a generation with memory of World War II that knew how Nazis and fascists would use personal information against their enemies,” Evan Hendricks, editor of Privacy Times, told Dash. These initial privacy rights were codified during the EU integration during the mid-1990s.
Until the US sees privacy as a basic human right, personal information theft and huge data breaches will continue.
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