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6 - Pervasive Data Harms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2023

Ignacio Cofone
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montréal
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Summary

Chapter 6 explores a different path: building privacy law on liability. Liability for material and immaterial privacy would improve the protection system. To achieve meaningful liability, though, laws must compensate privacy harm, not just the material consequences that stem from it. Compensation for financial and physical harms produced by the collection, processing, or sharing of data is important but insufficient. The proposed liability framework would address informational exploitation by making companies internalize risk. It would deter and remedy socially detrimental data practices, rather than chasing elusive individual control aims. Courts can distinguish harmful losses from benign ones by examining them on the basis of contextual and normative social values. By focusing on harm, privacy liability would overcome its current problems of causation quagmires and frivolous lawsuits.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Privacy Fallacy
Harm and Power in the Information Economy
, pp. 110 - 137
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Pervasive Data Harms
  • Ignacio Cofone, McGill University, Montréal
  • Book: The Privacy Fallacy
  • Online publication: 16 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108995825.007
Available formats
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  • Pervasive Data Harms
  • Ignacio Cofone, McGill University, Montréal
  • Book: The Privacy Fallacy
  • Online publication: 16 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108995825.007
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.

  • Pervasive Data Harms
  • Ignacio Cofone, McGill University, Montréal
  • Book: The Privacy Fallacy
  • Online publication: 16 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108995825.007
Available formats
×