This cartoon illustrates a key point my new book, ON PRIVACY AND TECHNOLOGY — the law must establish the right incentives for technology to promote privacy, safety, and other important values:

Only by establishing the right legal structure and the right incentives can the law succeed in holding creators and users of technology accountable. Instead, the law often does the opposite. It empowers the powerful; it makes exceptions for new technologies from traditional mechanisms of accountability; it allows organizations to construct business models based on massive scale and cheap expenses that are only possible by externalizing costs to individuals. Courts often fail to recognize privacy harms or trivialize them. Even when there are clear violations of privacy laws, courts use creativity not to help victims but to close off ways to obtain redress. Through its actions, the law is sending a message regarding new technologies: to create and use them irresponsibly and to care mainly about growth and profit. When harm is caused, the law often finds a way to help the wrongdoer evade responsibility. To avoid a dystopian future, we must demand that the law take a different path. (pp. 107-108)

You can order the book here.

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Here’s a cartoon about individual privacy rights. As I argued in my article, The Limitations of Privacy Rights, 98 Notre Dame Law Review 975 (2023), privacy law puts far to much onus on individuals to protect their privacy through exercising privacy rights such as rights to access, correct, object, or delete. These rights are time-consuming to use and do not scale given the number of companies that collect and use personal data. People just don’t know enough information to exercise rights in a meaningful way.

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