Category Archives: Privacy

Interesting Column by The Nation’s Rick Perlstein on Fine Print Contracts

Here.  And here's the beginning: Imagine you’ve clicked on your computer screen to accept a contract to purchase a good or service—a contract, you only realize later, that’s straight out of Kafka. The widget you’ve bought turns out to be a nightmare. You take to Yelp.com to complain about your experience—but lo, according to the […]

FTC Pursues Phone Text Spammers

The Times report is here.  An excerpt: The messages, which typically promise gift cards to national chain stores or other prizes, are sent to random phone numbers and usually direct recipients to a Web site where they are asked for personal information like Social Security numbers or credit card numbers, agency officials said.        Rarely, if […]

Porat & Strahilevitz Paper: Personalizing Default Rules and Disclosure with Big Data

Ariel Porat of Tel Aviv University and Chicago and Lior Strahilevitz of Chicago have written Personalizing Default Rules and Disclosure with Big Data.  Here's the abstract: This paper provides the first comprehensive account of personalized default rules and personalized disclosure in the law. Under a personalized approach to default rules, individuals are assigned default terms […]

Derek Bambauer Paper on Privacy vs. Security

Derek E. Bambauer of Arizona has written Privacy Versus Security, forthcoming in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.  Here is the abstract: Legal scholarship tends to conflate privacy and security. However, security and privacy can, and should, be treated as distinct concerns. Privacy discourse involves difficult normative decisions about competing claims to legitimate access […]

James Nehf on the Failed Promise of Information Privacy

James P. Nehf of Indiana University has written Open Book: The Failed Promise of Information Privacy in America.  Here's the abstract: With financial and other personal information about us in countless databases, and with companies such as Facebook and Google collecting data about their users to drive profits and satisfy expectations of shareholders, there is […]