Toward a Positive Theory of Privacy Law
Vol. 126 No. 7
Privacy protections create winners and losers. So does the absence of privacy protections. The distributive implications of governmental decisions regarding privacy are often very significant, but they can be subtle too. Policy and academic debates over privacy rules tend not to emphasize the distributive dimensions of those rules, and many privacy advocates mistakenly believe that all consumers and voters win when privacy is enhanced. At the same time, privacy skeptics who do discuss privacy in distributive terms sometimes score cheap rhetorical points by suggesting that only those with shameful secrets to hide benefit from privacy protections. Neither approach is appealing, and privacy scholars ought to do better.