A Country in Crisis: Data Privacy in the US

A Country in Crisis: Data Privacy in the US

In 2019, the United States held the world record of having the highest average cost per data breach at $8.19m, and healthcare data breaches affected 80% more people than just three years prior in 2017. In today’s data-driven environment, it seems not a day goes by without hearing of a data breach or leak. Data privacy in the US is a growing problem caused primarily by the exponential increase of digital data, the trend of moving data storage to the cloud, and lack of a federal data privacy regulation.


Over the past several years, digital data has been increasing at an unprecedented rate. To put it into perspective, in 2019 the overall global population increased at just over 1% to 7.7 billion, while the number of unique mobile phone users increased by 2% to 5.8 billion. In addition, the number of internet users increased 9% to 4.4 billion, which is 57% of the global population. As global urbanization continues, the sheer number of people utilizing data in their day-to-day lives will continue to grow. All of this data, which moves across continents in seconds, needs to be stored and managed somewhere. This exponential increase in the use of digital data has required an equally aggressive increase in data storage capabilities.


As digital data increases, so does the trend of moving data storage to the cloud. Often misunderstood, the cloud is not some mystical cumulus floating in the sky with ones and zeros suspended in it. Rather, the cloud is nothing more than large data centers that house racks and racks of servers and drives that run 24/7. While larger businesses previously owned their own data centers or used in-house data storage, there has been a rapid shift to cloud service providers over the past five years. From 2017 to 2019, the number of cloud service data centers rose fr ..

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