Welcome back to a special series of MLEX podcast designed to make sense of

2023 and what the new year is likely to bring. My name is James Panicki, MlexMex's Asia-Pacific senior editor. It's great to have

your company. Now, Mike Swift and our San Francisco team have had an action-filled year,

covering privacy and data protection policy developments and creeping enforcement across several

states. And 2023 is shaping up as an equally challenging moment in history

for technology companies, with several examples of state privacy legislation coming into effect.

In the meantime, progress on federal privacy law remains bogged down in Congress.

In the last days of 2022, our San Francisco Bureau filed

this forward-looking assessment. Hi, this is Mike Swift. I am the global chief correspondent

for data protection and data security issues here at Emlex. I'm based in San Francisco, California,

and I'm going to talk for a few minutes today about the outlook for 2023 in the data protection space in the United States.

We are really completing a tumultuous year here in the U.S.

We recently published a story noting that the legal cost of data protection violations by U.S.

companies got significantly steeper in 2022, topping $2.5 billion.

And there's little to suggest that that surge in regulatory risk and cost for companies

is going to slack off at all in 2023.

With new privacy laws taking effect and a more pugnacious regulators focusing on privacy and

data security, it's likely, in fact, that that number may even be increasing in future years.

In 2023, new privacy laws will take effect in California,

Utah, Virginia, Connecticut, and Colorado. And that's very much going to complicate the data

protection picture here in the United States. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission, which has signaled how aggressive it's going to be

on privacy with a recent whopping $520 million settlement with Epic Games, is expected to continue

...