Unpacking the Similarities and Differences of Data Privacy Laws in the United States

Introduction: Why Data Privacy Laws Matter

If you’re a stakeholder in your company’s data privacy program, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when taking stock of the current landscape of data privacy laws and expectations. Between the emergence of new regulations and enforcement actions that add clarity to existing laws, data privacy is evolving at a breakneck pace.

When building out your data privacy program, you’ll want to identify the gold standards of data privacy regulations—as well as the common denominators among them—and use them as a metric to evaluate your program. Doing this helps ensure you’re covered as new regulations emerge in states where you currently do business or if you expand into states with data privacy laws on the books.

In our Privacy Trends Report, we found that the majority of consumers are concerned in some way about how their personal data is handled. And more and more, users are demanding that local and national governing agencies take action to prevent irresponsible or unethical data privacy practices.

Data privacy has emerged as a bipartisan issue, as there’s an even mixture of red and blue states that have data privacy laws. Data privacy legislations introduced at the national level tend to have bipartisan support and sponsorship, too.

Ensuring that your business practices and processes that use sensitive data are compliant with these areas of overlap will put you well ahead of the curve on adapting to current and future state-level regulations as they develop.

Gartner predicts that 75% of the world’s population will have its personal data covered by modern privacy regulations by 2025.

Summary of State-Level Privacy Regulations

Until we do have a federal law like Europe with GDPR, we’ll have to navigate the patchwork of state-level regulations, but this doesn’t have to be difficult. Although there are some nuances to the individual state laws, there are some similarities among them. We built this guide because we could not find anything that clearly laid out what makes privacy law distinct from the other. We outline what similarities the regulations have and identify any interesting nuances to each state-side law worth noting.