Security News > 2021 > August > Data privacy laws are constantly changing: Make sure your business is up to date
Lawyer who specializes in data privacy discusses the importance of knowing the law no matter what size business you operate.
TechRepublic's Karen Roby spoke with Catherine Zhu, special counsel at Foley & Lardner, about the changing landscape of data privacy laws.
I think where it can really come back to hurt a company is when you push it down too far and you've built up all these operations and processes and everything without taking data minimization into account, without taking data privacy into account, it's almost like an accumulation of "Privacy debt" in the same way that you can accumulate technical debt, which makes it difficult later on to go back and revise all those processes and operations that are now baked in.
In 2018, that's when Europe passed their big GDPR legislation, which was a huge change in not just European data privacy law, but the global way of thinking about privacy law.
Especially for the U.S. However, in the last two years, these new regulations have been rolling out at a very fast clip, starting with the California Consumer Privacy Act that went into effect in early 2020, which became the most stringent data privacy law when it was passed in the United States for consumers.
I think, at this point, data privacy and data protection have really become table stakes, especially if you're operating a technology business.