excellent reading for today: The Secret History of Lead, The Nation Magazine March 2000 ..

many direct analogies indeed

They're only subject to large fines if those laws are in place and actually being enforced, though. Companies keep getting away with these huge data breaches in the United States with almost no real consequences.

It's getting harder and harder to ignore these laws unless you're willing to stay out of some major markets (such as Europe and California).

I think we'll see a national privacy law in the United States at some point in the next five years. There's appetite for it in both major parties (Democrats to protect bodily autonomy, Republicans to stick it to Big Tech), and I think the targets of the regulations themselves will at some point lobby for a consistent national law rather than the patchwork of state laws that we have now.

The RESTRICT Act suggests that there's political will in the US to solve the same problems that the GDPR solves. If the RESTRICT Act fails, the US might get federal-level privacy protection (subject to the PATRIOT Act, of course).

The RESTRICT act isn’t GDPR and actually contains everything they couldn’t pass in the PATRIOT act, right?

At least at my employer, we've gone the route of global GDPR compliance.

I find it helpful to think of data as uranium instead of oil. Both are valuable, but one is also a liability if you mishandle it. What you want to do is only have as little as you possibly need to make your business go toot, and dispose of it as promptly and safely as possible when you no longer need it.

Not from the US government they won't. Fines here are inconveniences to rich corporations, not obstacles. Maybe the EU will show some teeth.