How does 'free flow of data across borders' help secure consumers' privacy?
Setting caps on H1Bs is the US governments prerogative though this will have adverse impact on US-India relationship.
This is not about consumer privacy. This is about corporate profit. Visa, Mastercard and other US banks want to maintain fewer datacenters around the world. They already have them in the US (because US law) and they possibly also feed that data to US govt.
With such localization laws, US corporations are having to invest in other countries. They are lobbying to bully other countries for profit and this administration is ready to support profits at any cost.
It is the US government which has a problem because it wants direct access to data from foreign countries & corporations. In fact Microsoft was involved in a very long legal battle with them over it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._United_Stat....
The co-founder of Paytm (the CEO's brother) has been caught on video saying that it can provide all its customers' information in exchange for money. Oyo Rooms decided to funnel all hotel guest information to local police directly regardless of whether there was a crime or not and if the police requested for some data or not. There are many such instances where data privacy is not valued at all.
Given that MasterCard & Visa are only intermediary's between Indian companies and banks, Indian companies(PayTM, PayU, CCAvenue) already have access to all available data as the one who've initiated the transaction. In fact MasterCard/Visa processing the data outside the US actually increases the exposure of data and no amount of US data protection laws will help.