by Daniel J. Solove
I’m pleased to share with you my new article in Harvard Law Review entitled Privacy Self-Management and the Consent Dilemma, 126 Harvard Law Review 1880 (2013). You can download it for free on SSRN. This is a short piece (24 pages) so you can read it in one sitting.
Here are some key points in the Article:
1. The current regulatory approach for protecting privacy involves what I refer to as “privacy self-management” – the law provides people with a set of rights to enable them to decide how to weigh the costs and benefits of the collection, use, or disclosure of their information. People’s consent legitimizes nearly any form of collection, use, and disclosure of personal data. Unfortunately, privacy self-management is being asked to do work beyond its capabilities. Privacy self-management does not provide meaningful control over personal data.
2. Empirical and social science research has undermined key assumptions about how people make decisions regarding their data, assumptions that underpin and legitimize the privacy self-management model.
3. People cannot appropriately self-manage their privacy due to a series of structural problems. There are too many entities collecting and using personal data to make it feasible for people to manage their privacy separately with each entity. Moreover, many privacy harms are the result of an aggregation of pieces of data over a period of time by different entities. It is virtually impossible for people to weigh the costs and benefits of revealing information or permitting its use or transfer without an understanding of the potential downstream uses.
4. Privacy self-management addresses privacy in a series of isolated transactions guided by particular individuals. Privacy costs and benefits, however, are more appropriately assessed cumulatively and holistically — not merely at the individual level.
5. In order to advance, privacy law and policy must confront a complex and confounding dilemma with consent. Consent to collection, use, and disclosure of personal data is often not meaningful, and the most apparent solution – paternalistic measures – even more directly denies people the freedom to make consensual choices about their data.
6. The way forward involves (1) developing a coherent approach to consent, one that accounts for the social science discoveries about how people make decisions about personal data; (2) recognizing that people can engage in privacy self-management only selectively; (3) adjusting privacy law’s timing to focus on downstream uses; and (4) developing more substantive privacy rules.
The full article is here.
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This post was authored by Professor Daniel J. Solove, who through TeachPrivacy develops computer-based privacy training, data security training, HIPAA training, and many other forms of training on privacy and security topics. This post was originally posted on his blog at LinkedIn, where Solove is an “LinkedIn Influencer.” His blog has more than 600,000 followers.
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