Most modern U.S. state data privacy laws exempt from their definition of personal information “publicly available information.” What constitutes publicly available information differs between state privacy laws and may not correlate to the lay definition understood by many businesses and individuals. For example, while some businesses may consider information that is available on the internet to be “publicly available information,” most data privacy statutes would not classify all internet-accessible information as being “publicly available.” The following chart compares the definition of publicly available information between and among modern state privacy laws.
