he argument for adopting GDPR-like legislation in the U.S. would be made stronger if Europe’s laws to date successfully increased trust among consumers in the digital ecosystem. Unfortunately, reports and surveys indicate no such evidence. The biannual Eurobarometer survey, which interviews 100 individuals from each EU country on a variety of topics, has been tracking European trust in the Internet since 2009. Interestingly, European trust in the Internet remained flat from 2009 through 2017, despite the European Union strengthening its regulations in 2009 (implementation of which occurred over the subsequent few years) and significantly changing its privacy rules, such as the court decision that established the right to be forgotten in 2014. The evidence suggests that Europe’s data protection regulations to date have little to no positive effect on trust when compared with other countries who possess moderate or limited levels of data regulation. This is perhaps because consumers interpret heavy regulations as signs the government is telling its citizens that technology cannot be trusted. A poll conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) in 2015 and 2017 gives insight into Americans’ sense of online trust. During this period, the proportion of American households that reported online privacy or security concerns “fell from 84 percent to 73 percent.” Similarly, the proportion of households that said privacy concerns stopped them from doing certain activities online dropped from 45 percent to 33 percent. Trust among Americans can also be inferred from user response to Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In March of 2018, Facebook estimated that Cambridge Analytica was able to leverage its “academic” research into data on more than 87 million Americans. However, the Cambridge Analytica scandal veered from the traditional data leak narrative in which a hacker illegally obtains information directly from a data controller without their knowledge. Here, victims were shocked to find out that the data they had given their affirmative consent to have taken by a third-party app provider through Facebook had been subsequently provided to an outside third-party to target and create strategies in political campaigns. Despite the media’s efforts to perpetuate user distrust in Facebook, daily active users (DAU) on Facebook in the U.S has held steady. It seems millions of U.S. Facebook users are either completely oblivious to Facebook’s recent mishaps, or they are simply not concerned. Overall, the platform has gained over five million DAU since the 2016 election. Further, a recent poll reports that more than half of Americans under the age of 53 are either against the regulation of tech companies or believe that any attempts at regulation would make no difference. Many regulatory advocates have responded to this data by arguing that Facebook users are suffering from a “privacy paradox” – understanding the value of privacy but>