Patchwork Governance: Evidence from Data Breach Regulations

• In Event: Technology in Government: Analyzing Digital Transformation and Governance Challenges

Abstract

Data governance has become a core concern for organizations, governments, and all of society. Data security is central to data governance: organizations and governments are charged with protecting sensitive information, complying with laws and regulations, ensuring data integrity, and mitigating the risks of data loss. Data security helps reduce the likelihood of privacy externalities where the organization collecting the information does not bear the costs borne by those individualswhose privacy has been breached. In the United States, the lack of national legislation means that the 50 states have adopted a patchwork of laws addressing data breaches. Using text analysis and natural language processing techniques, we argue that this patchwork represents an opportunity to observe variation across connected governance arrangements, that the laws often vary by target (private sector or government), that the laws can be scaled as more or less stringent, and that the laws are connected by their compositions. This analysis helps expand our understanding of the infrastructure of protections that underpin much of our understanding of cybersecurity threats and attack surfaces.

Authors

• Andrew Whitford, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author

• Max Whitford, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author