Cornell Law Review

Article

Privacy Pretexts

Rory Van Loo, Boston University School of Law and Affiliated Fellow, Yale Law School Information Society Project

Data privacy’s ethos lies in protecting the individual from institutions. Increasingly, however, institutions are deploying privacy arguments in ways that harm individuals. Tech companies like Amazon, Meta (Facebook), and Alphabet (Google) wall off information from competitors in the name of privacy. Financial institutions under investigation justify withholding files from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by…

Dec 2022

Harming Competition and Consumers Under the Guise of Protecting Privacy: An Analysis of Apple’s iOS 14 Policy Updates

D. Daniel Sokol, Carolyn Craig Franklin Chair in Law and Business, USC Gould School of Law & Feng Zhu, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

This Essay identifies how Apple’s iOS 14 strategy serves to reinforce Apple’s dominance over the mobile ecosystem by significantly reducing—if not effectively precluding—the ability of third-party apps to create value through personalized advertising. This move to stifle competition is consistent with Apple’s established track record of engaging in conduct that protects and extends the dominance…

Jul 2022

Article

Prioritizing Privacy in the Courts and Beyond

Babette Boliek, Associate Professor of Law at Pepperdine University School of Law, J.D. Columbia University School of Law, Ph.D. Economics University of California, Davis.  

Big data has affected American life and business in a variety of ways—inspiring both technological development and industrial change. However, the legal protections for a person’s right to his or her own personal information have not matched the growth in the collection and aggregation of data. These legal shortcomings are exacerbated when third party privacy interests…

Jul 2018