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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2023

Ignacio Cofone
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montréal
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Summary

Tech companies bypass privacy laws daily, creating harm for profit. The information economy is plagued with hidden harms to people’s privacy, equality, finances, reputation, mental wellbeing, and even to democracy, produced by data breaches and data-fed business models. This book explores why this happens and proposes what to do about it. Legislators, policymakers, and judges are trapped into ineffective approaches to tackle digital harms because they work with tools unfit to deal with the unique challenges of data ecosystems that leverage AI. People are powerless towards inferences about them that they can’t anticipate, interfaces that manipulate them, and digital harms they can’t escape. Adopting a cross-jurisdictional scope, this book describes how laws and regulators can and should respond to these pervasive and expanding harms. In a world where data is everywhere, one of society’s most pressing challenges is addressing power discrepancies between the companies that profit from personal data and the people whose data produces profit. Doing so requires creating accountability for the consequences of corporate data practices—not the practices themselves. Laws can achieve this by creating a new type of liability that recognizes the social value of privacy, uncovering dynamics between individual and collective digital harms.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Privacy Fallacy
Harm and Power in the Information Economy
, pp. 1 - 10
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Introduction
  • Ignacio Cofone, McGill University, Montréal
  • Book: The Privacy Fallacy
  • Online publication: 16 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108995825.001
Available formats
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Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Introduction
  • Ignacio Cofone, McGill University, Montréal
  • Book: The Privacy Fallacy
  • Online publication: 16 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108995825.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Ignacio Cofone, McGill University, Montréal
  • Book: The Privacy Fallacy
  • Online publication: 16 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108995825.001
Available formats
×