PRIVACY + SECURITY BLOG

News, Developments, and Insights

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Jennifer Lawrence’s Nude Photos and Civil Rights Law: An Interview with Danielle Citron

Online Harm

“It is a sexual violation. It’s disgusting. The law needs to be changed, and we need to change.” — Jennifer Lawrence on her nude photos being non-consensually disclosed online Fairly recently, Jennifer Lawrence’s iCloud account was hacked and her private nude photos were stolen and posted online. She was mortified. Her case is just one […]

How Should the Law Handle Privacy and Data Security Harms?

by Daniel J. Solove In three earlier posts, I’ve been exploring the nature of privacy and data security harms. In the first post, Privacy and Data Security Violations: What’s The Harm?, I explored how the law often fails to recognize harm for privacy violations and data breaches. In the second post, Why the Law Often […]

Follow Professor Solove on Social Media

If you are interested in privacy and data security issues, there are many great ways Professor Solove can help you stay informed: Professor Solove’s LinkedIn Influencer blog You can follow Professor Solove on his blog at LinkedIn, where he is an “LinkedIn Influencer.”  He blogs about various privacy and data security issues. His blog has […]

Why the Law Often Doesn’t Recognize Privacy and Data Security Harms

by Daniel J. Solove In my previous post on privacy/security harms, I explained how the law is struggling to deal with privacy and data security harms. In this post, I will explore why. The Collective Harm Problem One of the challenges with data harms is that they are often created by the aggregation of many […]

Facebook’s Psych Experiment: Consent, Privacy, and Manipulation

by Daniel J. Solove This weekend, the results of an experiment conducted by researchers and Facebook were released, creating a fierce debate over the ethics of the endeavor. The experiment involved 689,003 people on Facebook whose News Feed was adjusted to contain either more positive or more negative emotional content. The researchers were looking for […]

Does the U.S. Supreme Court’s Decision on the 4th Amendment and Cell Phones Signal Future Changes to the Third Party Doctrine?

by Daniel J. Solove Today, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision on two cases involving the police searching cell phones incident to arrest. The Court held 9-0 in an opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts that the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant to search a cell phone even after a person is placed […]

Is the Right to Be Forgotten Good or Bad? This Is the Wrong Question

by Daniel J. Solove Is the right to be forgotten good or bad? This is the question many are asking these days in light of the recent EU Court of Justice (ECJ) decision that requires search engines such as Google to remove personal data from search results when people request it. (For more background, I […]

What Google Must Forget: The EU Ruling on the Right to Be Forgotten

  by Daniel J. Solove In a momentous decision, the EU Court of Justice has ruled in favor of a Spanish man who sought to have links to his personal data removed from Google search results. Under what has become known as the “right to be forgotten,” EU citizens have a right to the deletion […]

Snapchat and FTC Privacy and Security Consent Orders

by Daniel J. Solove Co-authored by Woodrow Hartzog The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently entered into a consent order with the media service Snapchat for not living up to its promises about how it maintains the privacy and security of user’s data. The FTC order prohibits Snapchat from “misrepresenting the extent to which it maintains […]

Our Privacy and Data Security Depend Upon Contracts Between Organizations

by Daniel J. Solove Increasingly, companies, hospitals, schools, and other organizations are using cloud service providers (and also other third party data service providers) to store and process the personal data of their customers, patients, clients, and others. When an entity shares people’s personal data with a cloud service provider, this data is protected in […]