Privacy Problem Solving

The Privacy Problem-Solving Project (“the Project”) has a mission to translate what we know so far about the law, economics, and psychology of privacy into concrete business practice guidance and model legislation. Faculty, research fellows, and students who take Prof. Bambauer’s privacy law course form a multidisciplinary team to analyze a problem related to personal data collection and use. We do so with sensitivity to the pragmatic goals and realistic costs and benefits that the problem raises. This work involves translating many of the insights that have come from research in law, economics, and psychology into practical steps, rules-of-thumb, and best practices.

Past and current projects include: 

• Advising and drafting the Uniform Law Commission’s Personal Data Protection Act
• Publishing a Lawfare white paper on appropriate uses of personal data for managing the COVID pandemic through smart phone apps (Covid Apps are Terrible. They Didn’t Have to Be.)
• Developing an alternative means of quantifying privacy in public records data releases (Plausible Deniability)
• Publishing a Knight Foundation white paper about legal safe harbors for researchers accessing social media data (A Safe Harbor for Platform Research)
• Amicus briefs challenging and objecting to the U.S. Census Bureau’s statistical privacy controls, the use of continuous video surveillance to monitor a criminal suspect’s house under the 4th Amendment, and the application of biometric privacy laws to effectively ban facial recognition technologies
• Providing guidance to NSF-funded research to establish best practices for research within and about indigenous communities
• Fostering a market for personal data management cooperatives to help share and distribute the wealth that is generated by Big Data