According to its drafters, the recently approved Uniform Personal Data Protection Act (UPDPA) was designed to offer a flexible and practical alternative to the existing quilt of U.S. consumer privacy laws. On February 4, Sidley Austin partner Alan Raul discussed the UPDPA with members of the Uniform Law Commission (ULC), a state-funded, non-partisan organization that proposes model laws for state legislatures to adopt, most famously the Uniform Commercial Code. The animating concept behind the ULC’s latest model law is to balance consumer concerns about data privacy while reducing business compliance costs and commercial disruptions. Legislation modeled on the UPDPA has already been introduced in at least three U.S. jurisdictions, which may grow as states consider possible solutions to inertia in Congress and divergence in state capitols.

The drafters explained that the UPDPA differs from existing privacy legislation in the U.S. and EU in that it adopts a tort-style approach and predicates privacy on the relationship between the data subject and the controller (e.g., between consumer and business). This concept of mutuality stems from the Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs), first articulated in the 1973 HEW Report, the Privacy Act of 1974, and the OECD Guidelines. This approach contrasts with the property-style (or right to control) approach taken by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA). Thus, rather than being premised on the idea that data subjects “own” their data, the UPDPA is intended to rely on a more nuanced view of a complex, mutually beneficial relationship among controllers and data subjects

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