Privacy legislation: a comparison of the US and European approaches

We are living in an increasingly connected world, not only in the office, but at home; a world in which more and more personal data is being stored in huge databases. With the increasing demands for personal data, often far in excess of the data required for the transaction in hand, so too does the reluctance to disclose such personal information. There is a perception that our personal information gets translated into unwanted direct marketing; that the most obvious manifestation of the e-connected world is of ever increasing amounts of spam, often from organisations that we have never heard of. This in turn has fuelled an awareness of the need to protect personal information.