Leslie Harris, Preventing the Next Privacy Disaster, The Huffington Post, Oct. 15, 2008

The U.S. has some of the weakest consumer privacy protections in the world. That fact was forgotten in the aftermath of the dotcom crash of 2000; the focus was on rebuilding the sector and plans to launch new business models that relied on mining of consumer data were put on the back burner. Eight years later, those business models have become the norm and the lack of privacy protections remains a festering embarrassment. Policymakers have been ambivalent, at best, in tackling the issue of passing a federal baseline privacy law. Without such a law, especially in light of the rapid technological advances we’ve experienced and our greater interdependence on web-based applications in our day-to-day lives, American’s privacy is needlessly put at risk.

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