Law Commons^™

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 …