"The Federal Trade Commission, a US agency created in 1914 to police the problem of 'bigness', has evolved into the most important regulator of information privacy - and thus innovation policy - in the world. Its policies profoundly affect business practices and serve to regulate most of the...

Google has come to symbolize the tensions between the benefits of innovative, information-dependent new services and the desire of individuals to control the contexts in which personal information is used. This essay reviews hundreds of newspaper articles where Google speaks about privacy in an...

At the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), all privacy and security matters are assigned to a consumer protection economist from the agency's Bureau of Economics (BE). The BE is an important yet often ignored element of the FTC. Advocates and others operating before the Commission have been...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is not of a single mind on privacy matters. Its privacy efforts are led by attorneys in the agency's Bureau of Consumer Protection, who are entrusted with case selection. These privacy efforts are evaluated by economists in the agency's Bureau of Economics, who...

Europeans face a regulatory challenge: how can the human rights and dignitary values that animate data protection law be protected in transborder data flows? With the proposal of the EU-US Privacy Shield, part of the challenge will be answered by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC is...

This report is one of 11 country reports produced for the "New Challenges to Data Protection" study, commissioned by the European Commission, and describes the ways in which US law addresses the challenges posed by the new social-technical-political environment. The hallmark of the US federal...

This article introduces a transaction cost economic framework for interpreting the roles consumers play in social networking services (“SNSs”). It explains why the exchange between consumers and SNSs is not simple and discrete, but rather a continuous transaction with atypical attributes....

Payment systems that allow people to pay using their mobile phones are promised to reduce transaction fees, increase convenience, and enhance payment security. New mobile payment systems also are likely to make it easier for businesses to identify consumers, to collect more information about...

In this paper, we consider why Americans may frame the generation and receipt of unsolicited advertising mail as a privacy violation. We then present data from our nationwide survey showing that a very large majority of Americans, across all ideologies, educational attainment levels, age, and...