The effects of the digital age on privacy in the United States

Over the course of the last 3 decades, the world has seen monumental shifts in how information is collected, transmitted, and disseminated. Every aspect of our personalities that live on the internet, including our browser history, photos we post to social media, our shopping decisions, and our selection of online friends, has been collated, quantified, and assimilated into a digital profile, which has skyrocketing value to an increasing number of businesses. With these developments in technology come the inevitable questions of ownership of such data, its use, misuse, and even possible theft. This paper takes a comprehensive and comparative look at the data privacy legislature in the two largest data hubs in the world, namely the United States and the European Union. The paper also seeks to address the shortcomings of certain, past legislative decisions, and makes a recommendation for the future. To do this, we analyze the events of the past, using the 2016 Facebook/Cambridge Analytica data scandal as a focal point.