Almaden Institute

The Social Costs of Incoherent Privacy Policies Abstract: A key virtue of the European Union’s comprehensive regulatory regime to protect personal data is its coherent concept of data privacy as a fundamental human right which the private, as well as public, sectors should respect. Firms that want to process personal data must design information systems to accommodate these rules, and technologists that want to build software to serve customers in the processing of personal data must pay attention to these rules as well. Many Americans, including technology firms, criticize the European data privacy regime as over broad, burdensome, and unrealistic. American data privacy policy is, by contrast, flexible and context-dependent. Yet the virtues of the American policy are also its key vices, for American data privacy policy is incoherent and, as a consequence, firms and technologists typically give privacy policy little attention in designing information systems, and this, in turn, erodes privacy as an active social value. This talk will suggest a strategy for building a coherent privacy policy that respects the societal values of privacy without unduly burdening commerce and system design.   Pamela Samuelson - Bio  Pamela Samuelson  Professor  Boalt Law School and School of Information Management and Systems  University of California, Berkeley  pam@sims.berkeley.edu  Web Sites  http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/ Biography Pamela Samuelson is a Professor at the University of California at Berkeley with a joint appointment in the School of Information Management & Systems as well as in the School of Law where she is a Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. She teaches courses on intellectual property, cyberlaw and information policy. She has written and spoken extensively about the challenges that new information technologies pose for traditional legal regimes, especially for intellectual property law and is an advisor for the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic. In June of 1997, she was named a Fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Samuelson is also a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, a Public Policy Fellow and a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a member of the American Law Institute, and a member of the Board of Directors for the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. From 1990-2000, she was a Contributing Editor of the computing professionals’ journal, Communications of the ACM, for which she wrote a regular "Legally Speaking" column. In May 2000, she received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Hawaii Law School. Samuelson is currently serving on the National Research Council’s Study Committee on Intellectual Property Rights in the Knowledge-Based Economy and previously served on the Council’s Study Committee on Intellectual Property Rights and the National Information Infrastructure which produced a report entitled "The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property Rights in an Information Age." In June 2000, the National Law Journal named her as one of the hundred most influential lawyers in the U.S. A 1976 graduate of Yale Law School, she practiced law as an associate with the New York law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher before turning to more academic pursuits. From 1981 through June 1996, she was a member of the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, from which she visited at Columbia, Cornell, and Emory Law Schools.