Moving forward together

As 2010 wore to a close, major reports on privacy were released almost simultaneously in the European Union and USA. The first, published on 4 November, came from the European Commission, ‘A Comprehensive Approach on Personal Data in the European Union’. The following month two US agencies released privacy reports. The Federal Trade Commission's report, ‘Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: A Proposed Framework for Businesses and Policymakers’, appeared on 1 December, and two weeks later the US Department of Commerce released its green paper on ‘Commercial Data Privacy and Innovation in the Internet Economy: A Dynamic Policy Framework’.