Why has identity theft remained so prevalent, in light of the development of ever more sophisticated fraud detection tools? Identity theft remains at 2003 levels – 9.9 million Americans fell victim to the crime in 2009.One faction explains the identity theft as a problem of a lack of control...

This short essay, prepared for the Future of Privacy Forum's Big Data and Privacy: Making Ends Meet event in September 2013, makes two observations concerning "big data." First, big data is not new. Consumer reporting, a field where information about individuals is aggregated and used to assess...

"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...

Identity theft is a growing problem. In any given identity theft situation, there are three actors - the victim, the impostor, and an institution, such as a bank or credit card company. Thus far, policymakers have attempted to address the crime by focusing on victims and impostors; victims are...

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...

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...

We are at the cusp of a technological revolution, one where technologists master the special physics of the smallest particles; a revolution that promises to provide capabilities that are, somewhat paradoxically, extraordinarily large.Law and Policy for the Quantum Age explains the genesis of...

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...

The rise of cybercrime in the last decade is an economic case of individuals responding to monetary and psychological incentives. Two main drivers for cybercrime can be identi fied: the potential gains from cyberattacks are increasing with the growth of importance of the Internet, and...