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...

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...

"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...

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...

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...

Most people may believe that online activities are tracked more pervasively now than they were in the past. In 2011, we started surveying the online mechanisms used to track people online (e.g., HTTP cookies, Flash cookies and HTML5 storage). We called this our Web Privacy Census. We repeated...

Alan Westin’s well-known and often-used privacy segmentation fails to describe privacy markets or consumer choices accurately. The segmentation divides survey respondents into “privacy fundamentalists,” “privacy pragmatists,” and the “privacy unconcerned.” It describes the average...

Homo economicus reliably makes an appearance in regulatory debates concerning information privacy. Under the still-dominant U.S. “notice and choice” approach to consumer information privacy, the rational consumer is expected to negotiate for privacy protection by reading privacy policies and...