Both the United States (US) and the countries of the European Union (EU) recognize the importance of establishing and enforcing privacy laws that govern Internet use. The two governments have very different approaches and practices, however, when it comes to protecting an individual's personal data on the Internet.

INTERNET PRIVACY IN THE UNITED STATES

Most consumers use the Internet every day without thinking about how their personal information is being used. Individuals may notice an increase in the amount of "spam" email they receive after making an online purchase, but they rarely consider that the spam might have resulted from that purchase.

The entire supply chain - the site that handled online registration for the seller of the item, the online seller, the online payment merchant, the order fulfillment desk, and the shipping company that eventually delivered the newly purchased item to the buyer - had the buyer's email address. Every link in the supply chain may have legally sold that address to any number of other parties as long as doing so did not violate the terms of their service agreement with the buyer.

The terms of service agreement usually appears as one of several screens a user sees while completing a transaction. Consumers know they must click "I agree" to proceed with their purchase, so many consumers click "I agree" to the terms of service without reading them first, and without realizing that they have just agreed that their email address can be sold to others. US law does not prohibit the sale of email addresses collected during the processing of online transactions.

WHAT US LAW PROTECTS

US law protects the transfers of five broad categories of information:

(1) financial records;
(2) medical records;
(3) genetic records;
(4) Social Security numbers; and
(5) records involving children under the age of 13.

If you are over 13 years of age, your name, your email address, your shipping address, what merchandise you ordered, how much it cost, how much you paid for it - all these parts of your online transaction are not protected from disclosure to others. In the United States, each industry is expected to regulate and police itself when it comes to maintaining the privacy of personal data.

The advantage of this arrangement is that it gives each industry the flexibility to regulate in a way that makes sense based on the kind of information the industry processes. The disadvantage is that companies in

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