The Privacy Ecosystem: Regulating Digital Identity in the United States and European Union

Abstract

How do policymakers and governments effectively safeguard digital privacy in the cloud? How do governments protect data stored in “the cloud” in a policy landscape that is simultaneously local, national, and global? In this article, we examine what we term “the privacy ecosystem”—the extensive global network of infrastructure, policies, legal rights, and cultural preferences that create privacy affordances for our digital information stored remotely. With these questions in mind, we look at some of the differing regulatory strategies of the European Union and United States, and the resulting contrast between policies governing privacy in the digital space.