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The U.S. needs a privacy amendment to the Constitution.
I've worked in European countries with strong privacy laws, some embedded in their Constitutions. (Germany is particularly strong in this regard, mostly as a result of how the Nazis used written public records to sniff out Jewish ancestry.)
The differences are enormous. Companies are limited in what personal data they can collect and must strictly control who can view that data. The concept of "mailing lists" distributed amongst telemarketing firms is virtually unheard of. The credit report industry is wholly different too.
Moreover, there is an attitude amongst the populace that personal data should be private -- and any transgression generates outrage. In contrast, although there is a lot of lip service in the US to keeping data private (such as having people sign the privacy statement when going to a doctor or pharmacist) it seems that most people have become acclimated to having their data in government databases.
