Law professor and privacy law scholar Dan Solove recently wrote:
Today, the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) published a large advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle encouraging people to exercise their privacy rights. “The ball is in your court,” the ad declared. (H/T Paul Schwartz)
CPPA ad in the SF Chronicle on individual privacy rights. Photo by Paul Schwartz, via Daniel Solove
While I admire the CPPA’s effort to educate, the notion that the ball is in the individuals’ court is not a good one. This puts the on individuals to protect their privacy when they are ill-equipped to do so and then leads to blaming them when they fail to do so.
I wrote an article last year about how privacy laws rely too much on rights, which are not an effective way to bring data collection and use under control: The Limitations of Privacy Rights, 98 Notre Dame Law Review 975 (2023).
Individual privacy rights are often at the heart of information privacy and data protection laws. Unfortunately, rights are often asked to do far more work than they are capable of doing.
