Private Law Theory

ABSTRACT
When it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica obtained the personal and private information of eighty-seven million Facebook users to aid the US presidential campaign of Donald J Trump, it was described as privacy’s ‘Three Mile Island’: an event, like the famed nuclear accident from which the term comes, that would shake and shape an industry and its approach to digital privacy and the underlying political information such privacy protects. In the intervening three years, with another presidential election looming in the United States, and despite these revelations, little has changed in terms of protecting the type of private information essential to the functioning of democracies. But what the Cambridge Analytica scandal also made clear is that threats to private information revealed and embedded in our digital activities threaten democracy. What is more, these threats risk undermining individual identity and autonomy and the ability of individuals to pursue individual and collective self-determination. An individual’s political identity – who she associated with, what she says, what she thinks, the questions and ideas she explores, for whom she votes – is all caught up in notions of political privacy …

Brescia, Raymond H, Privacy’s ‘Three Mile Island’ and the Need to Protect Political Privacy in Private Law Contexts (July 18, 2020). Florida State University Law Review, volume 48 (forthcoming).

First posted 2020-08-05 12:56:36