The Hodgepodge Principle in U.S. Privacy Policy

Data, says Professor Lawrence Summers, is the new oil, "a hugely valuable asset essential to economic life." Personal data, the kind of data that invites thoughts of privacy, is a big part of that. The European Union saw this economic fuel source coming long ago and has responded over the last two decades with increasingly comprehensive privacy rules. The U.S., in contrast, has not. The U.S. has what a recent review by Solove and Hartzog called, "a hodgepodge of various constitutional protections, federal and state statutes, torts, regulatory rules, and treaties." Do we have a problem?