In the late 19th century, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published the “Right to Privacy,” articulating for the first time in the United States a privacy right, defining it as the “right to be let alone.”
Over the next nearly 130 years, US law on privacy continued to develop through common law torts, constitutional interpretation, the implementation of the Fair Information Practice Principles and the development of federal and state sectoral privacy law. Despite being a global leader on privacy, however, the US never developed a comprehensive federal privacy law to regulate the commercial use of information, or data; instead enacting laws to protect particularly sensitive personal data privacy, such as financial, health and children’s information.
