Harvard Law Review Symposium on Privacy & Technology

This Friday, November 9th, I will be introducing and participating in the Harvard Law Review's symposium on privacy and technology.  The symposium is open to the public, and is from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM at Harvard Law School (Langdell South). 

I have posted a draft of my symposium essay on SSRN, where it can be downloaded for free.  The essay will be published in the Harvard Law Review in 2013.  My essay is entitled Privacy Self-Management and the Consent Paradox, and I discuss what I call the "privacy self-management model," which is the current regulatory approach for protecting privacy -- the law provides people with a set of rights to enable them to decide for themselves about how to weigh the costs and benefits of the collection, use, or disclosure of their data. I demonstrate how this model fails to serve as adequate protection of privacy, and I argue that privacy law and policy must confront a confounding paradox with consent.  Currently, consent to the collection, use, and disclosure of personal data is often not meaningful, but the most apparent solution -- paternalistic measures -- even more directly denies people the freedom to make consensual choices about their data.

I welcome your comments on the draft, which will undergo considerable revision in the months to come.  In future posts, I plan to discuss a few points that I raise my essay, so I welcome your comments in these discussions as well. 

The line up of the symposium is as follows:

Symposium 2012:
Privacy & Technology

Daniel J. Solove
George Washinton University
“Introduction: Privacy Self-Management and the Consent Paradox”

Jonathan Zittrain
Harvard Law School

Paul Schwartz
Berkeley Law School
“The E.U.-U.S. Privacy Collision”

Lior Strahilevitz
University of Chicago
“A Positive Theory of Privacy”

Julie Cohen
Georgetown University
“What Privacy is For”

Neil Richards
Washington University
“The Harms of Surveillance”

Danielle Citron
University of Maryland

Anita Allen
University of Pennsylvania

Orin Kerr
George Washington University

Alessandro Acquisti
Carnegie Mellon University

Latanya Sweeney
Harvard University

Joel Reidenberg
Fordham University

Paul Ohm
University of Colorado

Tim Wu
Columbia University

Thomas Crocker
University of South Carolina

Danny Weitzner
MIT