Privacy Law Commons^™

Redefining Genomic Privacy: Trust And Empowerment, Yaniv Erlich, James B. Williams, David Glazer, Kenneth Yocum, Nita A. Farahany, Maynard Olson, Arvind Narayanan, Lincoln D. Stein, Jan A. Witkowski, Robert C. Kain

Faculty Scholarship

Fulfilling the promise of the genetic revolution requires the analysis of large datasets containing information from thousands to millions of participants. However, sharing human genomic data requires protecting subjects from potential harm. Current models rely on de-identification techniques in which privacy versus data utility becomes a zero-sum game. Instead, we propose the use of trust-enabling techniques to create a solution in which researchers and participants both win. To do so we introduce three principles that facilitate trust in genetic research and outline one possible framework built upon those principles. Our hope is that such trust-centric frameworks provide a sustainable solution …

Private Law In The Gaps, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

Journal Articles

Private law subjects like tort, contract, and property are traditionally taken to be at the core of the common law tradition, yet statutes increasingly intersect with these bodies of doctrine. This Article draws on recent work in private law theory and statutory interpretation to consider afresh what courts should do with private law in statutory gaps. In particular, it focuses on statutes touching on tort law, a field at the leading edge of private law theory. This Article's analysis unsettles some conventional wisdom about the intersection of private law and statutes. Many leading tort scholars and jurists embrace a regulatory …

Online Privacy And The First Amendment: An Opt-In Approach To Data Processing, Joseph A. Tomain

Articles by Maurer Faculty

An individual has little to no ability to prevent online commercial actors from collecting, using, or disclosing data about her. This lack of individual choice is problematic in the Big Data era because individual privacy interests are threatened by the ever increasing number of actors processing data, as well as the ever increasing amount and types of data being processed. This Article argues that online commercial actors should be required to receive an individual’s opt-in consent prior to data processing as a way of protecting individual privacy. I analyze whether an opt-in requirement is constitutionally permissible under the First Amendment …

Rethinking Privacy, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Anxiety about surveillance and data mining has led many to embrace implausibly expansive and rigid conceptions of privacy. The premises of some current privacy arguments do not fit well with the broader political commitments of those who make them. In particular, liberals seem to have lost touch with the reservations about privacy expressed in the social criticism of some decades ago. They seem unable to imagine that preoccupation with privacy might amount to a “pursuit of loneliness” or how “eyes on the street” might have reassuring connotations. Without denying the importance of the effort to define and secure privacy values, …

Reviving Implied Confidentiality, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

The law of online relationships has a significant flaw-it regularly fails to account for the possibility of an implied confidence. The established doctrine of implied confidentiality is, without explanation, almost entirely absent from online jurisprudence in environments where it has traditionally been applied offline, such as with sensitive data sets and intimate social interactions.

Courts' abandonment of implied confidentiality in online environments should have been foreseen. The concept has not been developed enough to be consistently applied in environments such as the Internet that lack obvious physical or contextual cues of confidence. This absence is significant because implied confidentiality could …

The Ftc And The New Common Law Of Privacy, Daniel J. Solove, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

One of the great ironies about information privacy law is that the primary regulation of privacy in the United States has barely been studied in a scholarly way. Since the late 1990s, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been enforcing companies’ privacy policies through its authority to police unfair and deceptive trade practices. Despite over fifteen years of FTC enforcement, there is no meaningful body of judicial decisions to show for it. The cases have nearly all resulted in settlement agreements. Nevertheless, companies look to these agreements to guide their privacy practices. Thus, in practice, FTC privacy jurisprudence has become …

The Ftc And Privacy And Security Duties For The Cloud, Daniel J. Solove, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Third-party data service providers, especially providers of cloud computing services, present unique and difficult privacy and data security challenges. While many companies that directly collect data from consumers are bound by the promises they make to individuals in their privacy policies, cloud service providers are usually not a part of this arrangement. It is not entirely clear what, if any, obligations cloud service providers have to protect the data of individuals with whom they have no contractual relationship. This problem is especially acute because many institutions sharing personal data with cloud service providers fail to include significant privacy and security …

The Value Of Modest Privacy Protections In A Hyper Social World, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Two of the greatest modem challenges to protecting personal information are determining how to protect information that is already known by many and how to create an adequate remedy for privacy harms that are opaque, remote, or cumulative. Both of these challenges are front and center for those who seek to protect socially shared information. Social media and wearable communication technologies like Google Glass present vexing questions about whether information that is known by many can ever be "private," what the privacy harm might be from this information's misuse, and how to remedy such harms in balance with competing values …

Rethinking Online Privacy In Canada: Commentary On Voltage Pictures V. John And Jane Doe, Ngozi Okidegbe

Faculty Scholarship

This article problematizes the use of the bona fide case standard as the legal standard for a court to order a third party Internet Service Provider ("ISP") to disclose subscriber information to a copyright owner in online piracy cases. It argues that ISP account holders have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their subscriber information. It contends that the current bona fide case standard affords a relatively low threshold of protection for Internet users’ subscriber information. The reason for which the article takes this position is that the bona fide case standard can be met solely by IP address evidence, …

When Two Worlds Collide: The Interface Between Competition Law And Data Protection, Fred H. Cate, Christopher Kuner, Christopher Millard, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson, Orla Lynskey

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The (Data Privacy) Law Hasn't Even Checked In When Technology Takes Off, Fred H. Cate, Christopher Kuner, Christopher Millard, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Taking Stock After Four Years, Fred H. Cate, Christopher Kuner, Christopher Millard, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Systematic Government Access To Private-Sector Data Redux, Fred H. Cate, Christopher Kuner, Christopher Millard, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Big Business, Big Government And Big Legal Questions, Michael Mattioli, Todd Vare

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.