I have a confession to make, one that is difficult to fess up to on the US side of the pond: I love the GDPR.
There, I said it. . .
In the United States, a common refrain about GDPR is that it is unreasonable, unworkable, an insane piece of legislation that doesn’t understand how the Internet works, and a dinosaur romping around in the Digital Age.
But the GDPR isn’t designed to be followed as precisely as one would build a rocket ship. It’s an aspirational law. Although perfect compliance isn’t likely, the practical goal of the GDPR is for organizations to try hard, to get as much of the way there as possible.
The GDPR is the most profound privacy law of our generation. Of course, it’s not perfect, but it has more packed into it than any other privacy law I’ve seen. The GDPR is quite majestic in its scope and ambition. Rather than shy away from tough issues, rather than tiptoe cautiously, the GDPR tackles nearly everything.
Here are 10 reasons why I love the GDPR:
(1) Omnibus and Comprehensive
Unlike the law in the US, which is sectoral (each law focuses on specific economic sectors), the GDPR is omnibus – it sets a baseline of privacy protections for all personal data.
This baseline is important. In the US, protection depends upon not just the type of data but the entities that hold it. For example, HIPAA doesn’t protect all health data, only health data created or maintained by specific types of entities. Health data people share with a health app, for example, might not be protected at all by HIPAA. This is quite confusing to individuals. In the EU, the baseline protections ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.
It is difficult to predict how the FTC will approach privacy. The new commissioners will be inheriting some high-profile investigations (Equifax and Facebook), and they will also be inheriting the legacy of the FTC as serving as the leading privacy regulator in the United States. There are some, such as Berin Szóka, who 
