View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Georgetown Law Scholarly Commons Georgetown University Law Center Scholarship @ GEORGETOWN LAW 2019 Catalyzing Privacy Law Anupam Chander Georgetown University Law Center,
[email protected] Margot E. Kaminski University of Colorado Law School,
[email protected] William McGeveran University of Minnesota Law School,
[email protected] This paper can be downloaded free of charge from: https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/2190 https://ssrn.com/abstract=3433922 This open-access article is brought to you by the Georgetown Law Library. Posted with permission of the author. Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub Part of the Law and Economics Commons, Privacy Law Commons, and the Science and Technology Law Commons Draft, February 6, 2020 CATALYZING PRIVACY LAW Anupam Chander, * Margot E. Kaminski,** & William McGeveran***† The United States famously lacks a comprehensive federal data privacy law. In the past year, however, over half the states have proposed broad privacy bills or have established task forces to propose possible privacy legislation. Meanwhile, congressional committees are holding hearings on multiple privacy bills. What is catalyzing this legislative momentum? Some believe that Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force in 2018, is the driving factor. But with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which took effect in January 2020, California has emerged as an alternate contender in the race to set the new standard for privacy. Our close comparison of the GDPR and California’s privacy law reveals that the California law is not GDPR-lite: it retains a fundamentally American approach to information privacy.