USA and it’s existing Privacy Laws

So far we discussed a lot about PIPEDA, GDPR, Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules 2021. We also tried to approach the historical aspects of each country, the background behind the enactment of those Privacy laws and precedents that paved a way in the field of privacy laws. 

Today we thought of writing a very introductory kind of article just to let our readers know what all privacy laws are available in the USA, therefore, we wrote today’s article restricting ourselves to introduce only the names of privacy laws available in the USA. So in the USA there are no federal privacy laws which can regulate many industries/companies, unless the state has its own privacy laws. 

In this article we tried writing the names of those laws and have provided a minimal basic information related to the privacy laws in the USA and they are-

1) HIPAA– Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act-1996, a federal law that was passed in 1996 objectives are-

  1. Providing health insurance portability by eliminating job-lock due to pre-existing medical condition
  2. Minimise healthcare fraud and abuse
  3. Enforce standards for health information
  4. Adhere to the security and privacy of health information 

2) FCRA- Fair Credit Reporting Act, USA’s Federal law that promotes accuracy, fairness and privacy for data used by consumer reporting agencies

3) FERPA – Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, is a federal law enacted in 1974 that protects the privacy of student education records

4) GLBA-The Gramm Leach Bliley Act also known as the Financial Modernization Act 1999.

5) ECPA– Electronic Communications Privacy Act 1986, restricts government wiretaps on telephone calls and other electronics signals. 

6) COPPA – Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, 2000, protects the collection of data for children under 13 years old.

7) VPPA – The Video Privacy Protection Act 1988, the aim of this act is to prevent the wrongful disclosure of video tape rentals.
8) FTC Act– Federal Trade Commission Act, this act empowers the authority to go behind an app or website who violates its own privacy policy.

Picture credit- https://piwik.pro/blog/data-privacy-laws-united-states