Conference: The New Frontiers of Privacy Harm

What harms are privacy laws designed to prevent? How are people injured when corporations, governments, or other individuals collect, disclose, or use information about them in ways that defy expectations, prior agreements, formal rules, or settled norms? How has technology changed the nature of privacy harm? These questions loom large in debates over privacy law. Often, they are answered skeptically. The President of the United States justifies massive NSA surveillance programs by arguing that non-content surveillance is not very harmful. Advertisers resist calls for aggressive forms of Do Not Track by arguing that the way they track online behavior creates little risk of harm. Judges dismiss lawsuits brought by users suing services that suffer massive data breaches, for lack of harm. Meanwhile, many privacy law scholars and advocates do not speak consistently, if they speak at all, about privacy harm. Some prefer to talk about "problems" or "conflicts" not harms. Others point primarily to abstract, societal harms such as chilling effects or harms to dignity or individual autonomy. Many of these people have tried to move the conversation away from harm and what they see as crabbed, tort-centric approaches to privacy protection. It is time to revisit old conversations about harm. New practices and technologies raise new threats of harm. The fear of Big Data techniques (for example in the public debate over the pregnancy prediction program of the retailer Target) have inspired new theories of harm. Economists and computer scientists have developed new ways of measuring privacy harm. Regulators have adopted new ways of talking about harm. Join the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship on Friday, January 17, 2014, from 9:00 AM - 4:15 PM (with a reception to follow) as we venture into the New Frontiers of Privacy Harm. We will assemble thought leaders and top practitioners and regulators for a diverse and rich set of conversations about privacy harm.

Event Details

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