Each year, FPF invites privacy scholars and authors interested in privacy questions to submit articles and papers to be considered by members of our Advisory Board, with an aim toward showcasing those articles that should inform any conversation about privacy among policymakers in Congress, as well as at the Federal Trade Commission and in other government agencies. For our fifth annual Privacy Papers for Policymakers, we received a record number of submissions covering topics ranging from data use in elections, government surveillance, the always-present cloud, and even the emergence of app stores for the brain.
However, in a year where the White House launched a review into the privacy implications of “Big Data,” scholars and privacy advocates were particularly focused on looking at how algorithms are changing our society – and what that means for individuals’ privacy. Our Advisory Board selected papers that addressed this challenge head-on. It also selected papers that describe how information about consumers is being collected, gathered, and used across the Internet, and what role the FTC should specifically play in policing the privacy and data security practices around those activities.
Our top privacy papers for 2014 are, in alphabetical order:
Big Data’s Disparate Impact
Solon Barocas & Andrew Selbst
Four Privacy Myths
Neil Richards
Free: Accounting for the Costs of the Internet’s Most Popular Price
Chris Jay Hoofnagle & Jan Whittington
The Scope and Potential of FTC Data Protection
Woodrow Hartzog & Dan Solove
The Scored Society
Danielle Citron & Frank Pasquale
The Scoring of America: How Secret Consumer Scores Threaten Your Privacy and Your Future
Pam Dixon and Robert Gellman
These papers illuminate concerns that will continue to drive privacy debates in 2015. Already in the new year, we have seen the White House push new proposals to address student privacy and identity theft. The Internet of Things has made headlines, moving from something that is coming to something that is here.
FPF held a reception to celebrate the release of our Privacy Papers digest at an event on March 3, 2015. We want to thank EY for their special support of this project. And we thank the scholars, advocates, and Advisory Board members that are engaged with us to explore the future of privacy.
