Experimenting with Privacy : Driving Efficiency Through a State-Informed Federal Data Breach Notification and Data Protection Law

Against a backdrop of annual data breaches compromising approximately one billion global records and an average data breach cost of nearly six billion dollars, the absence of clear US federal strategy for data breach notification and security requirements threatens both consumer privacy and business contracting efficiency. Fifty-one US states and territories have created data breach notification and other statutes, creating a range of statutory requirements for businesses, from strict to flexible. Prevailing and trending state statutes provide an opportunity to create a common federal US data breach notification statute, and by leveraging state statutory language in its text, a federal statute could improve security for consumers and efficiency for business while reflecting local attitudes regarding data breach notification and data protection