Sasha Romanosky writes:
There are many policy interventions that legislators can impose to reduce harms caused by one party to another. Two that are very often compared are safety regulations (mandated standards) and liability. They lend themselves well to comparison because they’re generally employed on either side of some harmful event (e.g. data breach or toxic spill): ex ante regulations are applied before the harm, and ex post liability is applied after the harm.
A third approach, one that we might consider ‘sitting between’ regulation and liability, is information disclosure (e.g. data breach disclosure (security breach notification) laws). I’d like to take a few paragraphs to compare these alternatives in regards to data breaches and privacy harms.
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