Law Commons^™

Fulfilling Government 2.0'S Promise With Robust Privacy Protections, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

The public can now “friend” the White House and scores of agencies on social networks, virtual worlds, and video-sharing sites. The Obama Administration sees this trend as crucial to enhancing governmental transparency, public participation, and collaboration. As the President has underscored, government needs to tap into the public’s expertise because it doesn’t have all of the answers.

To be sure, Government 2.0 might improve civic engagement. But it also might produce privacy vulnerabilities because agencies often gain access to individuals’ social network profiles, photographs, videos, and contact lists when interacting with individuals online. Little would prevent agencies from using and …

Visionary Pragmatism And The Value Of Privacy In The Twenty-First Century, Danielle K. Citron, Leslie Henry

Faculty Scholarship

Despite extensive scholarly, legislative, and judicial attention to privacy, our understanding of privacy and the interests it protects remains inadequate. At the crux of this problem is privacy’s protean nature: it means “so many different things to so many different people” that attempts to articulate just what it is, or why it is important, generally have failed or become unwieldy. As a result, important privacy problems remain unaddressed, often to society’s detriment.

In his newest book, Understanding Privacy, Daniel J. Solove aims to reverse this state of affairs with a pluralistic conception of privacy that recognizes the societal value of …

Visionary Pragmatism And The Value Of Privacy In The Twenty-First Century, Danielle Keats Citron, Leslie Meltzer Henry

Michigan Law Review

Part I of our Review discusses the central premises of Understanding Privacy, with particular attention paid to Solove's pragmatic methodology and his taxonomy of privacy. We introduce his pluralistic approach to conceptualizing privacy, which urges decision makers to assess privacy problems in context, and we explore his view that meaningful choices about privacy depend on an appreciation of how privacy benefits society as a whole. We also describe how Solove's taxonomy aims to account for the variety of activities that threaten privacy. In Part II, we analyze the strengths of Solove's pragmatism by demonstrating its functionality and flexibility in …

Information Privacy In Public Space: Location Data, Data Protection And The Reasonable Expectation Of Privacy, Teresa Scassa

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

This article considers whether the permissive disclosure provisions of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and its substantially similar counterparts mean that law enforcement agents have ready access to information about our movements and activities, or whether s. 8 of the Charter plays a role in limiting the circumstances in which disclosure without notice or consent may take place.