PRIVACY + SECURITY BLOG

News, Developments, and Insights

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Who Are the Privacy and Security Cops on the Beat?

privacy and security

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by Daniel J. Solove

Are privacy and security laws being enforced effectively? This post is post #3 of a series called Enforcing Privacy and Security Laws.

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The Privacy Pillory and the Security Rack: The Enforcement Toolkit

privacy pillory

law blog 2

by Daniel J. Solove

Are privacy and security laws being enforced effectively? This post is post #2 in a series called Enforcing Privacy and Security Laws. See the end of this post for links to other posts in this series.

What kind of sanctions do privacy and security laws use for enforcement? In this post, I will discuss the various tools that are frequently used in the enforcement of privacy/security laws.

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Why Enforce Privacy and Security Laws?

law blog 1by Daniel J. Solove

law blog 2

PART 1

Are privacy and security laws being enforced effectively? This post is part of a series called Enforcing Privacy and Security Laws.

How are privacy and security laws enforced? How should they be enforced? What enforcement works well? What doesn’t? What are the various agencies that are enforcing privacy laws doing? How do the agencies compare in their enforcement efforts?

I plan to explore these questions in a series of posts. Collectively, I’ll call this series “Enforcing Privacy and Security Laws.”

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

Online Harm

Fairly recently, Jennifer Lawrence’s iCloud account was hacked and her private photos were stolen and posted online. She was mortified.

Her case is just one of many, according to Professor Danielle Citron (University of Maryland School of Law), who very recently published a book about online harassment, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (Harvard University Press 2014).

Citron - Hate Crimes in Cyberspace

It is a compelling and provocative book. It is a bold book. And as the recent news stories indicate, it is a book that couldn’t be more timely and more needed. One might think that online harassment is rare. Who would write such mean and vile things? What kind of person would harass Zelda Williams, the daughter of Robin Williams, who was viciously attacked online immediately after her father’s death? Even Caligula would show more humanity.

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Why Being Well-Regulated Is Good for Business

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by Daniel J. Solove

After Apple announced that it wouldn’t provide law enforcement with an easy back door to access data on people’s devices, we heard loud whining coming from the FBI and various security proponents that this would be bad for security.

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The Best Preventative Medicine for Health Data Breaches

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by Daniel J. Solove

Last week, I gave a keynote address at a conference called Safeguarding Health Information: Building Assurance through HIPAA Security, sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office for Civil Rights (OCR). I’d like to summarize my remarks here for anyone interested who wasn’t able to attend.

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How to Enter the Privacy Profession

privacy profession

by Daniel J. Solove

The privacy profession is growing by leaps and bounds, but entering it is tricky. My law students and others frequently ask me how they can enter the privacy field. Most jobs seem to require a few years of experience, but the privacy profession is still relatively new, and getting this experience can be difficult because there are not many clear paths to entry.

Once in the field, the demand is high for privacy professionals with experience. But there is a bottleneck in getting into the club. I have written about this problem in a previous blog post.

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Big Myths About Big Data

big data post

by Daniel J. Solove

The FTC held a workshop this Monday about Big Data. The term “Big Data” is used everywhere these days, and depending upon who is talking about it, Big Data is either the hippest thing in the world and the producer of miracles that will save the human race, or it is the scourge of all evil and the doom of freedom and democracy. I think that neither is the truth, and I want to dispel some myths about Big Data:

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Why Do Lawsuits for Data Breaches Continue Even Though the Law Is Against Plaintiffs?

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by Daniel J. Solove

If there’s a big data breach, the class action lawyers will start nipping like a bunch of hungry crocodiles. Upwards of forty separate lawsuits were filed against Target after its data breach, and one was filed the day after the breach became public knowledge.

The law, however, has thus far been far from kind to plaintiffs in data breaches. Most courts dismiss claims for lack of harm. I have written extensively about harm in a series of posts on this blog, and I have chided courts for failing to recognize harm when they should.

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