For the London Free Press – May 6, 2013 – Read this at lfpress.com
There has been controversy in the United States in the last few weeks about their patchwork of privacy laws in contrast to the holistic approach favoured by Canada and the European Union. This matters as commerce and cloud services become more borderless.
The U.S. approach to privacy has been to enact laws that apply to narrow areas as problems are perceived, rather than to look at privacy as a broader subject to regulate.
For example, in 1988 the United States Congress passed the Video Privacy and Protection Act to prevent wrongful disclosure of videotape rental or sale records. Though such laws may be effective in the short term, they have a narrow focus, fail to address future technology and leave gaps. And the process to change existing laws is typically glacier slow.
Some privacy regulation is the U.S, isn’t based on privacy laws at all, but on regulatory action and class-action lawsuits based on notions such as the breach of a company’s privacy policy. In other words, the wrong was a breach of a privacy promise, not a breach of a legal privacy requirement.
In contrast, the Canadian and European model deals with privacy on a holistic basis. The holistic approach allows for existing privacy laws to adapt to new technologies rather than having to create new privacy laws in response to new technologies.
In any given Canadian province there are likely no more than two privacy statutes that apply to the private sector.
One applies to personal information generally, and there’s often a separate one that applies to medical records. This is a far more stable, all-encompassing and technology-neutral approach to privacy issues than the U.S. model.
Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel at Google, recently commented on this issue and his desire to see the United States enact better privacy laws. He notes not a single country has followed the U.S. model.
Fleischer praises European privacy laws for their simplicity and warns if changes aren’t made to the U.S. approach “privacy will prove a serious roadblock to any such future trade back (with the European Union), as long as some people in Europe can argue that the U.S. has not-effective privacy laws.”
Fleischer provides the example of Uruguay that has looked to Spain. as opposed to the U.S., when drafting its recent privacy laws.
In the long run, the holistic approach is a far better and more effective model to protect privacy interests. The holistic approach makes it easier for businesses to understand their obligations and comply, easier for individuals to know where they stand, has less risk of leaving privacy gaps, and makes it easier to deal internationally when other countries require privacy protection as a condition of personal information crossing borders.
As the world continues to emerge from the global economic crisis and the trend toward global integration continues, Canada’s holistic privacy framework will help us take advantage of global opportunities while a less-effective framework could damage U.S. efforts.