Privacy Law Commons^™

Are "Better" Security Breach Notification Laws Possible?, Jane K. Winn

Articles

This Article will evaluate the provisions of California's pioneering security breach notification law (SBNL) in light of "better regulation" or "smart regulation" criteria in order to highlight the costs of taking a narrowly focused, piecemeal approach and the benefits of taking a more comprehensive perspective to the problems of identity theft and information security. Just as the basic structure of SBNLs was borrowed from environmental law, this Article will borrow from decades of analysis of the impact of environmental regulation to evaluate the likely impact of SBNLs.

Just as environmental laws can be used to reduce externalities created through the …