At this point in time, almost every marketer has heard about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Europe’s sweeping data privacy legislation that went into effect at the end of May. US companies are bound by this law because it governs all European Union (EU) members, no matter where their data is collected. Under GDPR, data privacy breaches carry huge penalties — up to 4 percent of a company’s annual global turnover or €20 million (whichever is greater).
But what is the US doing about data privacy on its own turf? And what do marketers think about those efforts?
The Department of Commerce starts its work
Last week, David J. Redl, an assistant secretary of the US Department of Commerce, spoke to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) at its IGF-USA 2018 conference about the Trump administration’s plans to work on data privacy issues. His statements about data privacy laws hampering the progress of business echoed comments made in late May by Redl’s boss, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. Ross wrote an impassioned critique of GDPR in London’s Financial Times just days after the European law went into effect, calling it “likely to create barriers to trade.”
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