By Rohan Massey and Edward Machin ( February 25, 2019, 2:19 PM EST) -- 2018 was the year that data protection went mainstream. Having once been a topic that most folks treated with a combination of ignorance and inconvenience — "I have to read another privacy policy?" — by the year's end the concept of privacy had firmly entered the public consciousness. Widely viewed congressional hearings on the misuse of personal data, a series of high-profile security breaches at Fortune 500 companies and an episode of "60 Minutes" dedicated to how a European law is influencing U.S. legislators all helped privacy and data security rise to the top of the public, corporate and legislative agendas....