My Senate Testimony on Privacy, Data Collection & Do Not Track

Today I’ll be testifying at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on online privacy and commercial data collection issues. In my remarks, I make three primary points:

First, no matter how well-intentioned, restrictions on data collection could negatively impact the competitiveness of America’s digital economy, as well as consumer choice.
Second, it is unwise to place too much faith in any single, silver-bullet solution to privacy, including “Do Not Track,” because such schemes are easily evaded or defeated and often fail to live up to their billing.
Finally, with those two points in mind, we should look to alternative and less costly approaches to protecting privacy that rely on education, empowerment, and targeted enforcement of existing laws. Serious and lasting long-term privacy protection requires a layered, multifaceted approach incorporating many solutions.

The testimony also contains 4 appendices elaborating on some of these themes.

Down below, I’ve embedded my testimony, a list of 10 recent essays I’ve penned on these topics, and a video in which I explain “How I Think about Privacy” (which was taped last summer at an event up at the University of Maine’s Center for Law and Innovation). Finally, the best summary of my work on these issues can be found in this recent Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy article, “The Pursuit of Privacy in a World Where Information Control is Failing.” (This is the first of two complimentary law review articles I will be releasing this year dealing with privacy policy. The second, which will be published early this summer by the George Mason University Law Review, is entitled, “A Framework for Benefit-Cost Analysis in Digital Privacy Debates.”)

Testimony of Adam D. Thierer before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation hearing…