Category Archives: Privacy

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 […]

Do Consumers Want a Do-Not-Mail List?

Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Jennifer M. Urban, both of Berkeley Law, and Su Li of Berkely’s Center for the Study of Law and Society, have written Privacy and Advertising Mail.  Here’s the abstract: In this paper, we consider why Americans may frame the generation and receipt of unsolicited advertising mail as a privacy violation. We then present data […]

Calo’s Against Notice Skepticism

by Jeff Sovern I've moved on to the privacy chapter of our casebook, and in that regard I just finished reading M. Ryan Calo's (Calo is at the University of Washington and affilated with Stanford)  intriguing Against Notice Skepticism In Privacy (And Elsewhere), 87 Notre Dame Law Review 1027 (2012).  Before I add my two […]

Disclosure vs. Regulation

by Jeff Sovern Last week I had a very interesting conversation with a Ph.D candidate from the University of Amsterdam, Frederik J. Zuiderveen Borgesius, who is researching privacy regulation and behavioral targeting. He asked me if I could refer him to a book that explores when disclosure is an appropriate response to consumer protection problems […]

Mark Budnitz on Mobile Financial Services

Mark Elliott Budnitz of Georgia State has written Mobile Financial Services: The Need for a Comprehensive Consumer Protection Law, 27 Banking & Finance Law Review (2012).  Here's the abstract: The article first describes mobile financial services for consumers and the types of companies participating in the provision of those services. Anticipated consumer problems are explored, […]

Times Magazine Asks Who Do Online Advertisers Think You Are?

by Jeff Sovern Here.  The piece is by GW's Jeffrey Rosen and explores how online marketers gather and use information about consumers.  Rosen describes how he visited different web sites using two different browsers, as a result of which one online marketer, BlueKai, created two inconsistent personae for him.  BlueKai, incidentally, allows consumers to see […]

Solove Paper on Privacy Self-Management vs. Paternalism

Daniel J. Solove of GW has written Privacy Self-Management and the Consent Paradox, 126 Harvard Law Review (2013).  Here's the abstract: The current regulatory approach for protecting privacy involves what I refer to as the “privacy self-management model” – the law provides people with a set of rights to enable them to decide for themselves […]