Solove to deliver ITI Distinguished Lecture on privacy and consent

GSLIS Assistant Professor Masooda Bashir is hosting renowned privacy scholar Daniel J. Solove when he visits campus to deliver a public talk, “Privacy, the Consent Dilemma, and the Problem of Defining Harm,” on October 14 at 3:00 p.m. The lecture is part of the Information Trust Institute’s Distinguished Lecture Series. Bashir also serves as assistant professor in the Information Trust Institute at the College of Engineering.

In this talk, Professor Solove will examine some of the challenging issues that privacy regulation must face in the years to come.  Much regulation of privacy seeks to facilitate what Solove refers to as “privacy self-management,” which involves providing people with control over their personal data, and allowing them to decide for themselves about how to weigh the costs and benefits of the collection, use, or disclosure of their information.  The problem is that in many circumstances, privacy self-management does not work and likely cannot be made to work.  Consent to collection, use, and disclosure of personal data is often not meaningful, and for various reasons, it might not be possible to make such consent meaningful.  The most apparent solution – paternalistic measures – even more directly denies people the freedom to make consensual choices.  Additionally, Professor Solove will discuss challenges in defining privacy harm.  Privacy harms are often abstract and not visceral.  The harms are often caused by the cumulative actions by a multitude of entities.  The law is currently not adept at handling these types of harms.  Solove will explore some ways forward in this very challenging area.

Solove is the John Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. He is a senior policy advisor at Hogan Lovells. He is also the founder of TeachPrivacy, a company that provides privacy and data security training programs to businesses, schools, healthcare institutions, and other organizations.  Professor Solove is also co-reporter of the American Law Institute's Restatement of Information Privacy Principles.

Solove is the author of several books, including: Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security (Yale University Press 2011), Understanding Privacy (Harvard University Press 2008), The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet (Yale University Press 2007), and The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age(NYU Press 2004).  Professor Solove is also the author of several textbooks, including: Information Privacy Law (Aspen Publishing, 4th ed. 2012), Privacy Law Fundamentals (IAPP, 2nd edition 2013), and Privacy, Information, and Technology (Aspen Publishing, 3rd ed. 2012) (all textbooks with Paul M. Schwartz). 

He has written more than 50 law review articles in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Columbia Law Review, NYU Law Review, Michigan Law Review, U. Pennsylvania Law Review, U. Chicago Law Review, California Law Review, Duke Law Journal, and many others. Professor Solove blogs at LinkedIn as one of its “thought leaders,” and he has more than 850,000 followers.  

ITI is a campus-wide interdisciplinary unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led by the College of Engineering, that is fostering excellence in information trust and security. Participating units include, among others, the College of Applied Health Sciences; the College of Business; the College of Engineering; the College of Law; the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; the Department of Aerospace Engineering; the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering; the Department of Computer Science; the Coordinated Science Laboratory; the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; the Department of Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering; and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.