By ERIC DASH
IF the information is not already missing, 2005 might be recorded in the databanks of history as the year of the consumer privacy breach.
So far, American companies including financial services giants like Bank of America, Citigroup and MasterCard, and national retailers like DSW shoes and Ralph Lauren Polo, have announced data compromises. All told, the personal information of more than 50 million consumers has been lost, stolen and even sold to thieves.
Why is this happening here, and not, say, in Britain, Germany or France? One reason may be that every other Western country has a comprehensive set of national privacy laws and an office of data protection, led by a privacy commissioner.
The United States, by contrast, has a patchwork of state and federal laws and agencies responsible for data protection.
"In Europe, the question has been settled: citizens have strong legal rights," said Joel R. Reidenberg, a Fordham University law professor who is an expert on international data privacy rules. "In the United States, we basically have a mess, and we are still trying to sort it out."
More fundamentally, these two systems for dealing with data arise from a cultural divide over privacy itself. In broad terms, the United States looks at privacy largely as a consumer and an economic issue; in the rest of the developed world, it is regarded as a fundamental right.