Money For Your Life: Understanding Modern Privacy
The commercial law of privacy has long occupied a relatively marginal place in modern legal scholarship, situated in gaps among doctrinal exposition, critical conceptual elaboration, and economically-motivated modeling. Much of the explanation for the omission is surely technological. Until Internet technologies came along in the mid-1990s, it was difficult to turn private information into a “thing” that was both technically and economically worth buying and selling.
Technology and markets have passed the point of no return on that score. Claude Shannon, credited as the author of the insight that all information can be converted into digits, has met Adam Smith. Yet relevant legal scholarship has not quite found its footing. Paying for Privacy and the Personal Data Economy, from Stacy-Ann Elvy, offers a novel way forward. Professor Elvy’s article offers a nifty, highly concrete, and eminently useful framework for thinking about the commercial law of things that consist of assets derived from consumers’ private information. It is not only the case that commercial law is one of the legally-relevant attributes of privacy and privacy practices. Privacy can be thought of as a mode of commercial law. Continue reading "Money For Your Life: Understanding Modern Privacy"
