Recoding Privacy Law: Reflections on the Future Relationship Among Law, Technology, and Privacy

Slides Available Here

Abstract: Professor Gasser’s introduction to the Law, Privacy & Technology Commentary Series sketches the contours of a privacy landscape formed by the historic interplay of technology and society, to which the legal system adapted by forming certain distinctive response patterns. These patterns, Gasser argues, coupled with the prevailing mindset that technology and privacy are adversarial, must be reimagined in the context of the digital revolution and the shifting paradigm of state-centered law to networked governance. This “recoding” of the legal system would leverage digital technologies in service of privacy protection as well as maximize synergies across technical and legal disciplines, to craft a system for the digitally connected age that is firmly embedded in and embraces a broader framework of multi-modal, multi-layered, and multi-stakeholder global governance.

Bio: Urs Gasser is the Executive Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and a Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School. He serves as a trustee on the board of the NEXA Center for Internet & Society at the University of Torino and on the board of the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen, and is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin. He is a Fellow at the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research.