‘Free for the Taking (or Why Libertarians are Wrong about Markets for Privacy)’

Katherine J Strandburg, Free Fall: The Online Market’s Consumer Preference Disconnect, NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 13–62 (2013); Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Jan Whittington, Free: Accounting for the Internet’s Most Popular Price, 61 UCLA Law Review 606 (2014). Have you heard any of these arguments lately? Consumers willingly pay for the wonderful free services they enjoy using the currency of their personal information. We can’t trust surveys that say that consumers despise commercial tracking practices, because the revealed preferences of consumers demonstrate that they are willing to tolerate tracking in return for free social networking services, email, and mobile apps. If privacy law X were implemented, it would kill the free Internet (or more immodestly, the Internet). Two recent articles take on all of these arguments and more in the context of the privacy of information collected online by private corporations … (more)

[Paul Ohm, JOTWELL, 26 May]

First posted 2014-05-26 12:53:06

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