Transatlantic friction between companies and regulators has grown as Europe’s data guardians have become more assertive. Francesca Bignami, a professor at George Washington University’s law school, says that the explosion of digital technologies has made it impossible for watchdogs to keep a close eye on every web company operating in their backyard. So instead they are relying more on scapegoating prominent wrongdoers in the hope that this will deter others.

But regulators such as Peter Schaar, who heads Germany’s federal data-protection agency, say the gulf is exaggerated. Some European countries, he points out, now have rules that make companies who suffer big losses of customer data to report these to the authorities. The inspiration for these measures comes from America.

Yet even Mr Schaar admits that the internet’s global scale means that there will need to be changes on both sides of the Atlantic. He hints that Europe might adopt a more flexible regulatory stance if America were to create what amounts to an independent data-protection body along European lines. In Europe, where the flagship Data Protection Directive came into effect in 1995, before firms such as Google and Facebook were even founded, the European Commission is conducting a review of its privacy policies. In America Congress has begun debating a new privacy bill and the Federal Trade Commission is considering an overhaul of its rules. David Vladeck, the head of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, has acknowledged that “existing privacy frameworks have limitations”.

Even if America and Europe do narrow their differences, internet firms will still have to grapple with other data watchdogs. In Asia countries that belong to APEC are trying to develop a set of regional guidelines for privacy rules under an initiative known as the Data Privacy Pathfinder. Some countries such as Australia and New Zealand have longstanding privacy laws, but many emerging nations have yet to roll out fully fledged versions of their own. Mr Polonetsky sees Asia as “a new privacy battleground”, with America and Europe both keen to tempt countries towards their own regulatory model.

Privacy laws are somewhat more common in Latin America, where countries such as Argentina and Chile boast relatively strict European-style regimes. Mexico, which last year made data privacy a constitutional right, is also pushing through a new federal data-privacy law. The likely outcome is a mix of European and American privacy frameworks, predicts Katitza Rodriguez of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group.

Canada already has something of a hybrid privacy regime, which may explain why its data-protection commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, has been so influential on the international stage. She marshalled the signatories of the Google Buzz letter and took Facebook to task last year for breaching Canada’s data privacy laws, which led the company to change its policies.

Ms Stoddart argues that American companies often trip up on data-privacy issues because of “their brimming optimism that the whole world wants what they have rolled out in America.” Yet the same optimism has helped to create global companies that have brought huge benefits to consumers, while also presenting privacy regulators with tough choices. Shoehorning such firms into antiquated privacy frameworks will not benefit either them or their users.

via Legal confusion on internet privacy: The clash of data civilisations | The Economist.