Privacy Law Commons^™

The First Amendment In The Second Gilded Age, Jack M. Balkin

Buffalo Law Review

How do we pay for the digital public sphere? In the Second Gilded Age, the answer is primarily through digital surveillance and through finding ever new ways to make money out of personal data. Digital capitalism in the Second Gilded Age features an implicit bargain: a seemingly unlimited freedom to speak in exchange for the right to surveil and manipulate end users.To protect freedom of speech in the Second Gilded Age we must distinguish the values of free speech from the judicially created doctrines of the First Amendment. That is because the practical freedom to speak online depends on a …

Privacy's Double Standards, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

Where the right to privacy exists, it should be available to all people. If not universally available, then privacy rights should be particularly accessible to marginalized individuals who are subject to greater surveillance and are less able to absorb the social costs of privacy violations. But in practice, there is evidence that people of privilege tend to fare better when they bring privacy tort claims than do non-privileged individuals. This disparity occurs despite doctrine suggesting that those who occupy prominent and public social positions are entitled to diminished privacy tort protections.

This Article unearths disparate outcomes in public disclosure tort …