Lack Of Privacy In The United States

In a world where people fight for perfect security and privacy, there comes a time when we realize that it is impossible to have it all—especially if we value the added convenience that the lack of digital privacy tends to provide us with. We want our own personal activities to be known only to ourselves, and to have control over what we choose to divulge to others, but we also enjoy the convenience of targeted advertising on our favorite websites and the ease of social media. These contradicting ideas have given rise to different privacy “cultures” between different countries and nations, namely, between the United States and the European Union, who have very different ideas of what privacy is and the extent to which should be protected. The
In the U.S., people simply distrust the government, and often equate privacy with liberty from this notoriously prying entity. They don't want the government to have any more power than it already does, and in order to create a more all-encompassing privacy solution, they would have to trust the government to both devise the privacy law and enforce it, an idea which makes many Americans uncomfortable. And because privacy itself is not mentioned in the Constitution, the government has not given it serious weight, instead letting the idea be driven primarily by the market. It is also worth noting that the events of September 11, 2001 led to the creation of the US Patriot Act, which “significantly reduced the restrictions in the collection of personal data by law enforcement agencies” (Dimov). The EU, historically accustomed to dictatorships, declares privacy as a human right in their Charter of Fundamental Rights, making it akin to a constitutional right. More concerned with overbearing corporations, they recognize that privacy “is a core democratic value that must be safeguarded, not left to market forces”
There is no doubt that the concept of privacy is hard to pin down. One nation’s idea of privacy is often far-flung from another, resulting in very different cultures. Time has shown in the EU that their system does have its merits. But can these policies be adopted successfully in the U.S., which has spent decades trying to forge a government that is for the people and is less powerful than the European government they fled centuries ago? One thing is clear, and that is the need for accountability, in whatever form it must take—as Reidenberg claims, “oversight is critical if privacy rules are to have real meaning”, and many American’s are displeased with the U.S.’s self-regulation. Perhaps a legally enforceable privacy directive is just what America needs to take its privacy standards to a new level, enabling it to protect its citizens from a new frontier of data privacy