Program on Economics & Privacy director James Cooper appeared on Our Curious Amalgam, the podcast of the American Bar Association’s Antitrust Law Section. He joined the hosts to discuss the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act, proposed changes to the rules enforcing the Act, and the potential tradeoffs to certain proposals.

Listen to the podcast here.

Garrett A. Johnson, Assistant Professor of Marketing at Boston University Questrom School of Business, and Nico Neumann, Assistant Professor and Fellow, Centre for Business Analytics at the University of Melbourne Business School, are working on a paper titled “The advent of privacy-centric digital advertising: Tracing privacy-enhancing technology adoption.” The paper draft may be read here.

Please see below for a video of Professor Johnson explaining their work.

Earlier this week, the Law & Economics Center‘s Program on Economics & Privacy (PEP), along with the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project, filed a comment in response to the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule.

The comment focuses on those parts of the proposal that are most likely to impact operators’ incentives to provide online services for children: limitations on engagement; data minimization; and duplicative consent requirements. Together, these proposed modifications to the COPPA rule are likely to reduce the quantity and quality of online services for children by directly chilling operators’ incentives to improve their products and by reducing revenue streams needed to produce online services. The comment concludes that for regulatory intervention of this scale, the FTC must conduct a rigorous cost-benefit analysis that compares the reduction in consumer surplus from losses in online services against any benefits in mental and physical health to children, which it simply has failed to do. The comment also points out the legal frailty of these proposals. First, while there may be legitimate reasons to be concerned about children spending too much time on screens, Congress did not design COPPA to address this concern but left that in the hands of parents. Modifications to the COPPA rule adopted to address these concerns go beyond congressional authorization as found in the COPPA statute. Second, restrictions that reduce children’s ability to receive online content and to communicate online violate the First Amendment unless they are narrowly tailored to address an important government interest. Given the lack of empirical evidence the Commission has mustered, the comment concludes the FTC will have serious difficulty convincing a court that encouraging “engagement” (i.e., more speech) is categorically harmful, and the proposed rule modifications that would interfere with engagement will be struck down for failure to identify a government interest.

You can view the full joint comment here.

Last week the LEC’s Program on Economics & Privacy (PEP), along with University of Arizona’s TechLaw, filed a comment in response to the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on “Commercial Surveillance and Data Security.”

The Comment urges the FTC to refrain from issuing a proposed Commercial Surveillance rule. After describing the available empirical evidence—which shows the tremendous consumer value generated by the online ad-supported ecosystem and little reason to believe that consumers suffer widespread harm from the routine collection and use of data in the online commercial context—the Comment concludes that departure from the FTC’s current case-by-case application of Section 5, in favor of broad prohibitions on the collection and use of data, is likely to do more harm than good.

You can view the full joint comment here.

The Program on Economics & Privacy (PEP) at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School invites applications for the Research Roundtable on Regulating Privacy.  In the past year, Congress has considered sweeping national privacy legislation, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has begun the process to implement rulemaking to curtail so-called “commercial surveillance.”  Accordingly, we seek authors to develop and present original scholarly work that focuses broadly on the proper scope of privacy regulation, including the need for such regulation, the costs and benefits of such regulation, and the legal issues presented by such regulation.  Issues of interest include, but are not limited to: 

Continue reading “Call for Papers: Research Roundtable on “Regulating Privacy””

The report, titled “Private Litigation Under the California Consumer Privacy Act – CCPA Report Update,” examines the private actions filed under the CCPA from April 1, 2021 through December 31, 2021.

Executive Summary
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) went into effect on January 1, 2020. Broadly, the CCPA is designed to protect consumers’ privacy by making the collection and use of consumer data more transparent, and giving consumers the right to prevent companies from sharing their data with third parties. Although these core privacy provisions are enforced exclusively by the California Attorney General, the CCPA also provides a private right of action when a business’s failure to implement “reasonable security practices and procedures” results in the theft of personal information.

In 2021, the Program on Economics & Privacy issued its initial report, “Private Litigation Under the California Consumer Privacy Act,” which examined private CCPA cases filed from its effective date (January 2020) through the first quarter of 2021. This new Report provides data on private actions filed under the CCPA from April 1, 2021 through December 31, 2021, and highlights developments in cases covered in the 2021 Report.

Please click here to read the report.

Program on Economics & Privacy Director James Cooper interviews FTC Commissioner Noah Phillips on the Outlook for Privacy and Digital Ads as part of a discussion hosted by the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI). Click here to watch the video.

The Program on Economics & Privacy (PEP), part of the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, is seeking to provide financial support for empirical research on the law and economics of digital information policy. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

Continue reading “Call for Papers: Empirical Research on the Law and Economics of Digital Information Policy”

The report, titled “Private Litigation Under the California Consumer Privacy Act,” examines the private actions filed under the CCPA since its effective date.

Executive Summary
In June of 2018, the Governor of California signed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) into law. The law went into effect on January 1, 2020, and the Attorney General promulgated regulations to implement the CCPA in August 2020. Broadly, the CCPA is designed to protect consumer privacy by providing transparency into the personal data that businesses collect and share, and giving consumers the right to prevent companies from sharing their data with third parties. Although these core privacy provisions are enforced exclusively by the California Attorney General, the CCPA provides a private right of action when a business’s failure to implement “reasonable security practices and procedures” results in the theft of personal information.

Please click here to read the report.

Listen in to a new episode of the Law & Economics Center’s The Marketplace of Ideas podcast to hear a panel discussion on the findings of a new report by James Cooper, Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Program on Economics & Privacy at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School.

The report, titled “Elementary School Teacher Use of EdTech,” sheds light on the frequency and types of edtech used in the classroom, as well as the relationship between privacy training, edtech guidelines or state student privacy laws with the willingness to use edtech.

Please click here to read a copy of James Cooper’s report.

Click here to read the Executive Summary of the report.

Visit masonlec.org/podcast to listen to the full podcast episode.