Chapter 7 returns to the smart home as a way of examining the collected world challenges that will arise for information privacy law. It reviews the multidisciplinary literature on privacy risks in the smart home. It then highlights that sensor data collections are different in nature to the type of data collections envisaged by the control model of information privacy. Smart home sensor data collections are circular and continuous, which challenges the basis of rationality modes of consent provision, through privacy policies. Moreover, the very notion of control is challenged in boundary dispersed environments, such as the smart home, which are essentially fragmented and contested. These factors give rise to significant challenges for the control model of information privacy law and its focus on the process of personal information exchange.

Chapter 8 investigates the protection of information privacy in a collected world. A critique of the control model is undertaken in relation to five intended outcomes of information privacy law: enhancement of individual autonomy through non-interference protections at the point of data collection; power vacuums that preserve spaces for autonomous decision-making; information privacy law’s mode of transactional operation; the use of privacy policies, as information disclosure mechanisms; and in-built balancing mechanisms, which seeks to ensure fair outcomes for individuals and data collectors. Julie Cohen’s work is then examined as a means of further critiquing the control model and reshaping a conceptual focus of information privacy based on a more explicit power-related role. The new focus shifts what information privacy seeks to do, and challenges the fundamental precepts of the control model and what information privacy currently seeks to protect. The five intended outcomes thus change markedly. At the heart of this reformulated movement is Cohen’s work on modulation, which better describes the consequences and challenges that arise from the collected world.

Chapter 5 provides a conceptual overview of information privacy law to examine what it seeks to protect. Different concepts of information privacy provide alternative ideas about what its legal manifestations should protect. Moreover, information privacy concepts are themselves permeated, and permeate, broader concepts of privacy. The chapter identifies four conceptual themes that underpin information privacy’s development through coverage of key authors: Individual control over personal information; informational access and personal autonomous growth; a broader social and relational context; and privacy as a structural problem of power. The control concept is dominant as evident by its implementation as information privacy law. However, all themes are important regarding a stronger role for information privacy’s relational context and power-related elements.

Chapter 9 examines how new forms of information privacy law could develop to interrupt modulated forms of power. It highlights some design points for future legal reform. The design points outline some key areas that would allow reforms to develop based on Julie Cohen’s work. The implementation of these principles would require some form of detachment from information privacy’s core process protections, so the law could apply in gaps and spaces at the outskirts of process. These gaps and spaces are important because this is where selfhood flourishes and would therefore be a prime target for modulated forms of data collection. The design points would allow protection of gaps and spaces through the construction of new boundary options that create pauses in seamless forms of data collection and analysis. All of this would assist in information privacy law’s new role in exposing modulation. The chapter contends that a greater focus on relational forms of personal information is needed along with a collection principle based on fairness. New legal vocabularies and new ways of incentivising value discourse, as well as compliance orientations, in data collecting institutions are required.

Chapter 6 investigates the different foundational structures and jurisdictional perspectives of information privacy law that involve EU, US and Australian legal frameworks. A historical perspective of information privacy law developments in each jurisdiction is provided based on three founding legal instruments for each jurisdiction. Historical development is important because it highlights that, although different jurisdictional laws are based on the same principled approach, different jurisdictions adopt different emphases. Two particularly emphases are examined: the type of regulated information that triggers regulatory response, namely, personally identifiable information in the US, and personal data in the EU and personal information in Australia. Information privacy law’s principled process of protection is also examined. Attention is given to collection principles as a means of outlining foundational differences between sectoral and comprehensive regimes of information privacy, particularly regarding the overt use of a notice and consent model.

Chapter 1 outlines the book’s coverage. Part 2 sets the conceptual and legal framework from which the collected world consequences of Part 1’s analysis can be examined, particularly in relation to sensor data collections from the smart home. Part 3 then examines the consequences of the collected world and the challenges it will bring for information privacy law’s dominant control model and its manifestation in information privacy laws predicated on process protections. In doing so, it puts forward a reformulated role for information privacy law based on Julie Cohen’s work of the last decade, most notably, on modulated power.