Law Commons^™

First-Class Objects, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

What is the difference between "James Grimmelmann" and "@grimmelm" and why should we care? Some computer systems, like Facebook and credit reporting agencies, are inherently "about" people. Others are not. This essay argues that the key technical difference is whether they use unique identifiers to refer to people in their databases. From this single distinction, a host of social and humanistic consequences follow. The essay taxonomizes them and teases out some of their implications for privacy law.

Known And Unknown, Property And Contract: Comments On Hoofnagle And Moringiello, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In addition to gerund-noun-noun titles and a concern with the misaligned incentives of businesses that handle consumers' financial data, Chris Hoofnagle's Internalizing Identity Theft and Juliet Moringiello's Warranting Data Security share something else: hidden themes. Hoofnagle's paper is officially about an empirical study of identity theft, but behind the scenes it's also an exploration of where we draw the line between public information shared freely and secret information used to authenticate individuals. Moringiello's paper is officially a proposal for a new warranty of secure handling of payment information, but under the surface, it invites us to think about the relationship …

Privacy As Product Safety, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Online social media confound many of our familiar expectations about privacy. Contrary to popular myth, users of social software like Facebook do care about privacy, deserve it, and have trouble securing it for themselves. Moreover, traditional database-focused privacy regulations on the Fair Information Practices model, while often worthwhile, fail to engage with the distinctively social aspects of these online services.

Instead, online privacy law should take inspiration from a perhaps surprising quarter: product-safety law. A web site that directs users' personal information in ways they don't expect is a defectively designed product, and many concepts from products liability law could …

Saving Facebook, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the law and policy of privacy on social network sites, using Facebook as its principal example. It explains how Facebook users socialize on the site, why they misunderstand the risks involved, and how their privacy suffers as a result. Facebook offers a socially compelling platform that also facilitates peer-to-peer privacy violations: users harming each others' privacy interests. These two facts are inextricably linked; people use Facebook with the goal of sharing some information about themselves. Policymakers cannot make Facebook completely safe, but they can help people use it safely.

The Article makes …

Accidental Privacy Spills, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The realm of privacy law has more crimes than criminals, more wrongs than wrongdoers. Some invasions of privacy are neither intentional nor negligent; it's easy to recognize the harm, but hard to pin the blame.

Laurie Garrett attended the World Economic Forum as a journalist and wrote a private email to a few close friends, only to see that email end up on a widely-read weblog.

This essay tells the story of that inevitable accident: an "accident" in that it needn't have happened, but "inevitable" in that there's no principled way to prevent similar misunderstandings from recurring, again and again …

Warrantless Vehicle Searches And The Fourth Amendment: The Burger Court Attacks The Exclusionary Rule, Steven D. Clymer

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.