How America Can Stop Being the Wild West of Data

Governments everywhere are grappling with a difficult task: how to define what data the likes of Facebook and Google can collect about people, and what can be done with it. For the U.S., a new set of proposals from Senator Mark Warner might point the way forward.

In many ways, Europe has been the global standard-setter in regulating big data. Since 1995, it has strictly limited how personal information can be used. For the most part, if Europeans give a specific entity permission to collect their data for a specific use, that’s where it stops. Information gleaned from a person's activity on a social network, for example, cannot be repurposed to make credit decisions.