As companies have watched the domino effect of states passing their own data privacy statutes over the past five years, worries over a complex and diverse patchwork of laws have been growing.

But more recently, it's started to become clear that a common foundation for many of these laws is emerging, one that models after the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA) and takes the U.S. privacy regulatory framework slightly closer to a monolith than a patchwork.