The FTC has been active in international competition matters for almost a century, and it devotes significant resources to international consumer protection efforts. The FTC's activities come in several forms. It both assists and receives assistance from international law enforcement authorities in order to address fraud. It guides other nations in developing competition and consumer protection regimes. It evangelizes the US approach to privacy protection, with the goal of assuring policy-makers, especially Europeans, that the United States is a safe place for personal data. And in this last function, it polices Europeans’ privacy rights to a limited extent under the “Safe Harbor” agreement.

The challenge of evangelizing the US approach is difficult, because European privacy law, referred to as “data protection” law, is animated by different values and lessons from history about the power of information collection. The atrocities committed during the Holocaust were assisted through information technology, and private companies were complicit in Nazi activities. Furthermore, the penetration of reliable census-taking activities is one explanation of why so many Dutch Jews were killed in the Holocaust while nearby countries with fewer information collection activities had higher rates of Jewish survival. Stasi and Communist tracking of individuals and their social networks, and citizens “informing” on others reinforced the lesson that information can become a tool of oppression.

But it is too facile to invoke fear alone as the basis for international privacy rules. To foster a high level of respect for the individual, both the protection of private life and data protection are fundamental human rights in Europe. Privacy is recognized as a condition for a certain quality of personal life. Europeans also say that the region's strong privacy protections will promote commerce.

Evangelizing the US approach is also a challenge as other nations adopt European models of privacy regulation. Western Europe enjoys the highest living standards in history and is wealthier as a region than North America. This gives strong incentives for other nations to adopt European-style protections, so that they are eligible, or “adequate,” regimes for Europeans’ data. Other nations also find the European approach easier to adopt than the US sectoral model.

This chapter focuses on the FTC's international privacy efforts. To discuss these efforts, some background is needed concerning the European privacy regime.