Personal Information Policies in the United States and Britain: The Dilemma of Implementation Considerations

This article examines how issues of policy implementation affected the formulation and adoption of personal information policies in the United States and Britain. The analysis suggests that when implementation questions are raised during policy formulation, programmatic goals will be compromised to the interests bureaucracies have in implementation. In this case, the goal of protecting the privacy of personal information was sacrified to an implementation framework that protected bureaucratic needs. This poses a dilemma for policy analysts: when implementation questions are left unresolved in policy design, bureaucratic concerns dominate the implementation stage; yet, when implementation questions are resolved in policy design, bureaucratic concerns dominate the formulation stage.