Dennis Hirsch of Capital University Law School asks some intersting questions in his paper, Is Privacy Regulation the Environmental Law of the Information Age?
Ever since James Boyle raised the analogy of the environment in the context of intellectual property and the public domain, I've been thinking it has a resonance across a multitude of policy areas in the information society. Dr Hirsch's paper focuses on the potential for environmental covenants, environmental management systems and emission fees to provide models for privacy regulation but there are, as he recognises, many more.
And in Who's in Charge of Who I Am? Identity and Law Online, Susan Crawford takes an insightful look at our online personas and whether we have enough control over the data associated with them.
"As we enter this new century, identity online seems full of opportunity. Someday virtual world identities will be just as important as real identities - just as ecommerce has become indistinguishable from commerce. Control over online avatar identities will have many real-world consequences, because these clouds of bits may include our credit records, our buddy lists, our job records, personal references and other reputational information, medical histories, certifications, and academic transcripts. As soon as something is valuable and persistent, we seek to associate rights and duties with it. What will be the law of online identity to which those rights apply? And what will those rights be?"
Thanks to Steve Hedley for the links.
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