George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School

Private Litigation Under the California Consumer Privacy Act – 2022 Update

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.

Episode 2: Sasha Romanosky shares his thoughts on cybersecurity with James C. Cooper.

Sasha Romanosky is a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, and former cyber policy advisor at the Pentagon in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy (OSDP). He researches the economics of security and privacy, national security, applied microeconomics, and law and economics. For example, he has examined whether data breach notification laws reduced consumer identity theft; when and how firms are more likely to be sued when they suffer a data breach, and when they’re more likely to settle. He studied the cost of data breaches in order to understand whether corporate losses are really as severe as is commonly believed, and he collected a dataset of cyber insurance policies to examine how insurance carriers measure and price cyber risk. He has also studied private sector attribution of cyber incidents, and their impact to law enforcement, and the intelligence community. Romanosky was a research fellow in the Information Law Institute at New York University, and a security professional for over 10 years. He is one of the original coauthors of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), an open standard for scoring computer vulnerabilities, and EPSS, the Exploit Prediction Scoring System. While in DoD, he oversaw two of the Department’s most critical vulnerability programs, and advised on other matters related to cyber security and cyber policy. Romanosky holds a Ph.D. in public policy and management from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Calgary, Canada.

Episode 3: Jane Bambauer sits down with James C. Cooper to discuss her viewpoints on privacy and economics.

Jane Bambauer is a Professor of Law at the University of Arizona. Her research assesses the social costs and benefits of Big Data, and questions the wisdom of many well-intentioned privacy laws. Her articles have appeared in the Stanford Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. She holds a BS in Mathematics from Yale College and a JD from Yale Law School.

Episode 1: James C. Cooper discusses the need to focus on economics and privacy as a package with Donald J. Kochan.

James C. Cooper brings over a decade of public and private sector experience to his research and teaching. Prior to joining the faculty at Scalia Law, he served as Deputy and Acting Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Office of Policy Planning, Advisor to Federal Trade Commissioner William Kovacic, and as an associate in the antitrust group of Crowell & Moring, LLP. Professor Cooper returned to the FTC in 2018-19 to serve as a Deputy Director in the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. His research focuses on the law & economics of privacy, data security, and consumer protection, as well as on wide variety of topics surrounding competition policy, and it regularly appears in top academic journals, such as the Journal of Law & Economics, International Review of Law & Economics, Journal of Regulatory Economics, Antitrust Law Journal, and the Virginia Journal of Law & Technology. Professor Cooper has a BA from the University of South Carolina, received his PhD in economics from Emory University, and his law degree, magna cum laude, from the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, where he was a Levy Fellow and a member of the George Mason Law Review.

Call for Papers: Empirical Research on the Law and Economics of Digital Information Policy

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”

Call for Papers: Research Roundtable on “The Data-Competition Interface”

The Program on Economics & Privacy (PEP) at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School invites applications for its January, 2022 Research Roundtable on “The Data-Competition Interface.”  We seek authors to develop and present original work that focuses on the intersection between competition policy and other policy goals surrounding the digital economy.  Issues of interest include, but are not limited to: Continue reading “Call for Papers: Research Roundtable on “The Data-Competition Interface””

Ninth Annual Symposium on the Law & Economics of Privacy & Data Security

The Program on Economics & Privacy held its Ninth Annual Symposium on the Law & Economics of Privacy & Data Security in-person at the Antonin Scalia Law School on June 10, 2021. The symposium included a fireside chat with FTC Commissioner, Noah Phillips, and Jon Fasman, the U.S. Digital Editor for The Economist, who discussed his new book We See It All: Liberty and Justice in the Age of Perpetual Surveillance. The Symposium featured panels on surveillance capitalism, the interplay between privacy and competition, and the future of online advertising.

Private Litigation Under the California Consumer Privacy Act

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.

The First Amendment, Section 230, and Content Moderation

VIRTUAL
Date: March 3, 2021 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

Content moderation decisions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election—including the removal of President Trump from Twitter and Facebook—have brought into sharp relief the power that social media platforms wield in shaping the national discourse. These social media platforms have come under increasing fire from both the left and the right and have been accused of unfairly censoring conservative viewpoints and failing to adequately curb misinformation and harmful content. Indeed, there seems to be a bipartisan consensus to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides companies broad protection from suits involving both the content third parties post on their platforms and “good faith” content moderation decisions. Further, many have pointed to lack of competition as the culprit, suggesting antitrust or other economic regulation as a remedy for perceived problems with platforms’ content moderation decisions. At the same time, any reform proposal will have to be squared with these platforms’ First Amendment rights.

Join us for a vibrant discussion of these issues with a panel of distinguished academics:

Jane Bambauer, Professor of Law, The University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law

Genevieve Lakier, Assistant Professor of Law, Herbert and Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar, The University of Chicago Law School

Adam White, Assistant Professor and Executive Director, The C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School

ModeratorJames C. Cooper, Professor of Law and Director, Program on Economics & Privacy, Law & Economics Center, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School

Please see below for the recording of this event or click here to watch!