Law Scholars See Ballooning Interest in Privacy as Tech Grows More Invasive
Last month’s Privacy Law Scholars Conference showed exploding interest in privacy, as well as growing concern about how the government may be weaponizing personal information, said PLSC Chair Ari Waldman in an interview with Privacy Daily earlier this month. The May 28-29 meeting was the privacy scholars’ first conference since penning a letter that raised concerns about the Trump administration.
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At the annual event, audience members give detailed feedback on work-in-progress privacy papers. About 10 people attended the first PLSC in 2008, said Waldman, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine. That’s “ballooned” over the years to nearly 300 people at this year’s event, including those from industry, government, academia and nonprofits. Ten papers in progress were presented at the 2008 conference. This year, about 250 proposals were submitted and the conference accepted 80 for presentations, he said.
Waldman attributed the growth to privacy's importance increasing “exponentially over the last 20 [to] 30 years.” Two decades ago, “there was maybe one law school that recognized that having a person who focuses on privacy and technology was important,” he said. “Now many more law schools have dedicated faculty members that focus on it.”
“We are in a period where laws are changing,” the PLSC chair added. “And even if laws aren't passed, they're being debated. New proposals, new ideas [and] new ways of regulation are being debated. And the reason why that's happening is because, despite all this talk about privacy … the companies have been building more and more invasive project products.” At the same time, government surveillance has increased, he said. “Privacy is essential to resist authoritarianism, which is especially important now.”
PLSC papers’ topics typically reflect the issues of the day, said Waldman. This year’s crop covered a range of topics including AI, children, financial data, online harassment, surveillance and due process under the Fifth Amendment, he said. The conference awarded papers about pregnancy surveillance, children's data collected by police and “the way other members … of society police and surveil other people, ultimately serving the government.”
The change in U.S. president from Joe Biden to Donald Trump may have a greater impact on papers at next year’s PLSC, since submissions for this year’s conference were due last November, said Waldman. Even still, “we saw a lot more papers [this year] on the connection between privacy and totalitarianism” and “on the use of data collected for immigration enforcement or anti-abortion enforcement.”
“Next year we're going to see no papers about FTC rulemaking,” predicted Waldman, “because the rulemaking has stopped.”
The PLSC issued a letter to the privacy law community this spring noting scholars’ concerns about “threats to privacy and democracy” under the Trump administration (see 2505050011).
“We’ve never done anything like that before,” said Waldman, who wrote the letter. The group has since collected more than 500 signatures, “and now we’re thinking about where to go next.” Options include a full-page newspaper ad or filing amicus briefs in ongoing cases.
Privacy scholars have concerns about the administration’s “overall approach” of “weaponizing data for their real political purposes,” said Waldman. “They're collecting data to make it easier to surveil members of the public they don't like.”
On AI, Waldman believes that Congress’ proposed 10-year moratorium on enforcing state regulations (see 2506120083) “is just a craven attempt to cower to business' interests to avoid any type of accountability,” he said. “For some reason, this industry feels that it's uniquely entitled to not being regulated at all, and that's just wrong.”
“States are the experimenters now,” Waldman added. Some state privacy laws are better than others, he said, but the federal government isn’t doing anything.