Europe’s data protection laws are some of the strictest in the world, and have long been a thorn in the side of the data-guzzling Silicon Valley tech giants since they colonized vast swathes of the internet. Two decades later, one Democratic senator wants to bring many of those concepts to the United States. From a report: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has published a bill which, if passed, would create a U.S. federal data protection agency designed to protect the privacy of Americans and with the authority to enforce data practices across the country. The bill, which Gillibrand calls the Data Protection Act, will address a “growing data privacy crisis” in the U.S., the senator said. The U.S. is one of only a few countries without a data protection law (along with Venezuela, Libya, Sudan and Syria). Gillibrand said the U.S. is “vastly behind” other countries on data protection. Gillibrand said a new data protection agency would “create and meaningfully enforce” data protection and privacy rights federally. “The data privacy space remains a complete and total Wild West, and that is a huge problem,” the senator said.

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Source: Slashdot – A New Senate Bill Would Create a US Data Protection Agency