PRIVACY + SECURITY BLOG

News, Developments, and Insights

How to Fix the Supreme Court Justice Confirmation Process

There are few defenders of the Supreme Court Justice confirmation process. Every time it occurs, we go through a charade of hearings, where candidates are coy about their positions on most issues and talk about “neutrality” and being a mere “umpire.” Who are they kidding? We all know that no judge is neutral or a […]

An Interview with Dawn Nunziato on Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age

My colleague at George Washington University Law School, Professor Dawn Nunziato, has recently published a provocative book about the First Amendment and the Internet — Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age (Stanford University Press 2009). Her book explains that, contrary to the prevailing understanding of the Internet as a haven […]

Do Young People Care About Privacy?

One of the most frequent questions I get asked when talking about my book, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet is what to do about the troublesome younger generation which “doesn’t seem to care about privacy.”  “Those foolish kids,” some people say, “they have no concept of privacy.  They just […]

People Want Strong Punishments for Privacy Violations

People believe that privacy violations should be punished — and quite stringently.  There are interesting survey results in a new report by Chris Hoofnagle, Jennifer King, Su Li, and Joseph Turow, How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults When it Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies? The report focuses primarily on comparing the […]

City of Ontario v. Quon: The Rights of Other Parties to the Communication

I blogged about City of Ontario v. Quon a few days ago, and I want to raise another important issue in the case, one my colleague Orin Kerr has astutely pointed out.  The case is on appeal to the U.S. Supreme from the 9th Circuit: Quon v. Arch Wireless Operating Co., Inc., 529 F.3d 892 […]

Rationalizing Law

For quite a long time, extensive empirical work in psychology, sociology, and behavioral economics has been revealing that many of the law’s most cherished rules are faulty. They are based upon mistaken assumptions about human behavior. They are often flat out wrong. And yet they persist.