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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci once wrote (in translation) that ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’.1 Although Gramsci was not speaking about data privacy, it seems to us that this statement could apply to the current state of data protection regulation around the world, which is marked by a realization that existing regulatory models are not working effectively, the lack of political will to explore alternatives, and general frustration about how to improve the situation. This has led to a credibility gap between the objectives of data protection law and how personal data are protected in practice.

It should not be this way. The importance of data privacy has never been greater, and countries and regional organizations around the world are enacting legislation in an attempt to protect it. Much of this legislation has been based on the EU Data Protection Directive 95/46, which will be replaced by the proposed EU General Data Protection Regulation if the EU can ever finalize its interminable legislative process. Even the White House, which for years had seemed to oppose any large-scale federal legislation to deal with data processing in the private sector, has called for enactment of a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights Act to grant increased protection to the online processing of personal data. Regional organizations such as Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the Council of Europe, the Organization of American States, the Economic Community of West African States, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and others have also done extensive work to enact new privacy instruments or amend their existing ones. All this activity has also had an effect at the global level, with the UN General Assembly passing a resolution that affirms the ‘right to privacy in the digital age’.

But the increasing amount of new data protection regulation raises an important point: is all of this making any difference in increasing the protection of data privacy in practice [oxfordjournals.org]?

The article is an academic one that's too detailed for any summary to do it justice, but it takes a good run at codifying the issue.

Original Submission