All eyes are on Washington, DC, this week, as it started with U.S. President Barack Obama announcing a number of legislative proposals on consumer and student privacy in what he called a “sneak peak” into his State of the Union Address.

Obama invited the U.S. Congress to “work in a bipartisan, bicameral manner to advance this urgent priority for the American people,” read a White House press release. The proposals include a revised version of the proposed Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights as well as two new acts: one creating a national standard for breach notification and one preventing students' data collected for educational purposes from being shared and processed for unrelated purposes. 

“If we are going to be connected, we need to be protected,” Obama said. Oddly, just as he pronounced those words, the Twitter and YouTube accounts of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) got hacked by what CENTCOM called cyber-vandals, who signed themselves as “Isis”… But that’s another story.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the debate on when (whether?) the new data protection package will see the light of day is still open. Whilst commentators, stakeholders and EU institutions seem to agree that now is the time to act—this week’s Digest features a thought-provoking contribution from Eduardo Ustaran, CIPP/E, on the matter—in practice, the timing of the reform is still unclear. On the one hand, EU Commissioner for the Digital Economy & Society Günther Oettinger has been quoted as saying that he expects the data protection package to be adopted “no later than in the third quarter of 2015.” On the other, the European Parliament’s rapporteur on the data protection regulation does not seem to share the same optimism: Jan Philipp Albrecht in fact fears that strongly conflicting positions in the EU Council and Parliament might actually extend the negotiations beyond 2015. Could the truth be lying in the middle?