Law Commons^™

The Privacy Policymaking Of State Attorneys General, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

Accounts of privacy law have focused on legislation, federal agencies, and the self-regulation of privacy professionals. Crucial agents of regulatory change, however, have been ignored: the state attorneys general. This article is the first in-depth study of the privacy norm entrepreneurship of state attorneys general. Because so little has been written about this phenomenon, I engaged with primary sources — first interviewing state attorneys general and current and former career staff, and then examining documentary evidence received through FOIA requests submitted to AG offices around the country.

Much as Justice Louis Brandeis imagined states as laboratories of the law, offices …

Taking Trust Seriously In Privacy Law, Neil Richards, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Trust is beautiful. The willingness to accept vulnerability to the actions of others is the essential ingredient for friendship, commerce, transportation, and virtually every other activity that involves other people. It allows us to build things, and it allows us to grow. Trust is everywhere, but particularly at the core of the information relationships that have come to characterize our modern, digital lives. Relationships between people and their ISPs, social networks, and hired professionals are typically understood in terms of privacy. But the way we have talked about privacy has a pessimism problem – privacy is conceptualized in negative terms, …

Anonymization And Risk, Ira S. Rubinstein, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Perfect anonymization of data sets that contain personal information has failed. But the process of protecting data subjects in shared information remains integral to privacy practice and policy. While the deidentification debate has been vigorous and productive, there is no clear direction for policy. As a result, the law has been slow to adapt a holistic approach to protecting data subjects when data sets are released to others. Currently, the law is focused on whether an individual can be identified within a given set. We argue that the best way to move data release policy past the alleged failures of …