Economics offer different but complementary approaches to understanding privacy and security. For this inaugural contribution to the new In Our Orbit department, I was asked to explain briefly their methodological differences and similarities, and why they matter in our thinking about security...

Prepared for the North Carolina Law Review symposium on police body-worn Cameras (“BWC”s), this Article shows that BWCs can be conceptualized as an example of the Internet of Things (“IoT”). By combining the previously separate literatures on BWCs and IoT, this Article shows how insights...

We analyze personal data protection laws in the United States through the lenses of the economic theories of ex ante safety regulation, ex post liability and information disclosure. Specifically, we consider and contrast how legal and economic theories interpret privacy costs and the remedies to...

This article is part of a Wisconsin Law Review symposium in honor of the work of Neil Komesar, and particularly his book “Imperfect Alternatives: Choosing Institutions in Law, Economics, and Public Policy.” I used this as the main text in 2003 for one of the first law school courses on...

Privacy and security tools can help users protect themselves online. Unfortunately, people are often unaware of such tools, and have potentially harmful misconceptions about the protections provided by the tools they know about. Effectively encouraging the adoption of privacy tools requires...

This article examines the tension between social networks as enablers of political mobilization (sharing information is good) and as threats to privacy (sharing information is bad). A central theme is that social networks are platforms to create associations. Linguistically, “networks” and...

The goal of this article is to provide a framework for assessing issues of data portability and other required transfers of data. Greater portability and other required transfers of data can have pro-competitive effects – if more companies have access to commercially valuable data, then there...