Law Commons^™

Chain-Link Confidentiality, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Disclosing personal information online often feels like losing control over one’s data forever; but this loss is not inevitable. This essay proposes a “chain-link confidentiality” approach to protecting online privacy. One of the most difficult challenges to guarding privacy in the digital age is the protection of information once it is exposed to other people. A chain-link confidentiality regime would contractually link the disclosure of personal information to obligations to protect that information as the information moves downstream. The system would focus on the relationships not only between the discloser of information and the initial recipient, but also between the …