Last month, it was my great pleasure to serve as a “provocateur” at the IAPP’s (Int’l Assoc. of Privacy Professionals) annual “Navigate” conference. The event brought together a diverse audience and set of speakers from across the globe to discuss how to deal with the various privacy concerns associated with current and emerging technologies.
My remarks focused on a theme I have developed here for years: There are no simple, silver-bullet solutions to complex problems such as online safety, security, and privacy. Instead, only a “layered” approach incorporating many different solutions–education, media literacy, digital citizenship, evolving society norms, self-regulation, and targeted enforcement of existing legal standards–can really help us solve these problems. Even then, new challenges will present themselves as technology continues to evolve and evade traditional controls, solutions, or norms. It’s a never-ending game, and that’s why education must be our first-order solution. It better prepares us for an uncertain future. (I explained this approach in far more detail in this law review article.)
Anyway, if you’re interested in an 11-minute video of me saying all that, here ya go. Also, down below I have listed several of the recent essays, papers, and law review articles I have done on this issue.
Some of My Recent Essays on Privacy & Data Collection
Testimony / Filings:
- Senate Testimony on Privacy, Data Collection & Do Not Track – April 24, 2013
- Comments of the Mercatus Center to the FTC in Privacy & Security Implications of the Internet of Things
- Mercatus filing to FAA on commercial domestic drones
Law Review Articles:
- “The Pursuit of Privacy in a World Where Information Control is Failing” – Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy
- “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle” – Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology
- “A Framework for Benefit-Cost Analysis in Digital Privacy Debates” – George Mason University Law Review
Blog posts:
- A Better, Simpler Narrative for U.S. Privacy Policy – March 19, 2013
- On the Pursuit of Happiness… and Privacy – March 31, 2013
- Let’s Not Place All Our Eggs in the Do Not Track Basket (IAPP Privacy perspectives blog)
- Can We Adapt to the Internet of Things? – June 19, 2013 (IAPP Privacy perspectives blog)
- Isn’t “Do Not Track” Just a “Broadcast Flag” Mandate for Privacy? – Feb. 20, 2011
- Two Paradoxes of Privacy Regulation – Aug. 25, 2010
- Privacy as an Information Control Regime: The Challenges Ahead – Nov. 13, 2010
- When It Comes to Information Control, Everybody Has a Pet Issue & Everyone Will Be Disappointed – Apr. 29, 2011
- Lessons from the Gmail Privacy Scare of 2004 – March 25, 2011
- Who Really Believes in “Permissionless Innovation”? – March 4, 2013
- The Problem of Proportionality in Debates about Online Privacy and Child Safety – Nov. 28, 2009
- Obama Admin’s “Let’s-Be-Europe” Approach to Privacy Will Undermine U.S. Competitiveness– Jan. 5, 2011
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