Deirdre Mulligan

Is Sacramento the world’s capital of Internet privacy regulation?

Paul Schwartz, Deirdre Mulligan, Chris Hoofnagle quoted in Forbes TECH blog, January 6, 2014
Paul [Schwartz] explained that the state-federal dialogue has broken down because the current Congress is gridlocked. Meanwhile, California continues enacting “a tidal wave of California privacy laws.” He cautioned against waiting for a “federal Godot,” i.e., expecting Congress to reengage productively on privacy regulation.

Deirdre Mulligan … praised California’s long reputation for privacy leadership. She said regulators outside California look to California as a laboratory of experimentation, and those experiments have ripple effects across the globe.

Chris Hoofnagle … said notice-and-choice is based on rational choice theory, but consumers don’t always act rationally…. He believes consumers see the words “privacy policies” as seals, i.e., certifications of minimum protections. He favors correcting this by establishing minimum substantive legal standards for anyone who uses the term “privacy policy.”

Privacy laws can create opportunities, limitations, California lawmakers advised

Deirdre Mulligan and Paul Schwartz quoted in Bloomberg BNA , December 16, 2013

“Privacy rules don’t necessarily erode innovation. Sometimes they’re the fabric of it,” said Deirdre Mulligan, co-director of the University of California Berkeley School of Law Center for Law & Technology.

The ‘California Effect’ is how what California does ripples across the nation and the world, said Paul Schwartz…. “The California Effect is typically the first stage. It would be followed by action in D.C.,” which Schwartz said has been lacking. “The question becomes in absence of action in D.C., what should we do?” he asked. The question is whether “to act or not to act” in the world’s ninth largest economy.

Why travel suppliers should ‘spy’ on their customers

Deirdre Mulligan quoted in USA Today, November 25, 2013

Talk with information experts, and they’ll tell you that surveilling customers just to raise profits is ethically troublesome. Instead, companies should do it for the benefit of guests, says Deirdre Mulligan, who teaches courses on information technology and law at the University of California at Berkeley. The data collection has to be “properly disclosed and agreed to,” she says.

NSA surveillance reflects a broader interpretation of the Patriot Act

Deirdre Mulligan quoted in MIT Technology Review, June 7, 2013

Deirdre Mulligan … is also worried, and she’s not the only one. She attended the Privacy Law Scholars Conference at UC Berkeley on Friday and says the feeling was “morose.” “I think this revelation makes clear there was a cost to not having a more detailed conversation and public decision about the balances between democracy and policing,” she says.

NSA surveillance reflects a broader interpretation of the Patriot Act

Deirdre Mulligan quoted in MIT Technology Review, June 7, 2013

Deirdre Mulligan … is also worried, and she’s not the only one. She attended the Privacy Law Scholars Conference at UC Berkeley on Friday and says the feeling was “morose.” “I think this revelation makes clear there was a cost to not having a more detailed conversation and public decision about the balances between democracy and policing,” she says.

The modern privacy function: balancing strategy with the operational

Deirdre Mulligan and Kenneth Bamberger write for Privacy Perspectives, April 8, 2013

Our research looking at the work of privacy officers in U.S. federal agencies found that injecting privacy into strategic organizational deliberations drives home the perception that privacy is a policy decision with unavoidable connections to politics and impact—for better and for worse—on the bottom line.

Operationalizing privacy: how empowered is your privacy office?

Deirdre Mulligan and Kenneth Bamberger write for Privacy Perspectives, February 27, 2013

What level of independence and authority do privacy officers need so that they can embed a value as complicated as privacy—at times in tension with a whole host of bottom-line commitments, from identifying terrorists to placing effective ads —into a complex organization? …. We are engaged in research involving almost one hundred interviews of leading privacy officers, regulators and other privacy professionals in the U.S. and four European countries—Germany, France, Spain and the UK—to find answers to these questions grounded in the actual experience of privacy professionals.

Deirdre Mulligan, Kenneth Bamberger Co-Author Privacy Paper

Stanford Center for Internet and Society, March 4, 2011 by Omer Tene
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6629

I find the Deirdre Mulligan and Kenneth Bamberger paper, Privacy on the Books and on the Ground, eye opening in this respect. In what is surely one of the most important and influential papers on privacy over the past decade, the authors identify stark differences between the development of the profession on both sides of the Atlantic.

Kenneth Bamberger and Deirdre Mulligan Examine Privacy Law and Practice

-Center for American Progress, January 28, 2011 by Peter Swire
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/01/privacy_office.html

Much as is occurring this year, the FTC and Commerce Departments played complementary roles in the mid- to late-1990s in developing privacy policy…. The history of the FTC’s involvement in this period has been well discussed in work by Kenneth Bamberger and Deirdre Mulligan.

-Stanford Center for Internet and Society, February 4, 2011 by Omer Tene
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6609

For those interested in the development of the privacy profession, the role of the CPO (Chief Privacy Officer), and integration of privacy into corporate governance structures, I highly recommend a recent article by Ken Bamberger and Deirdre Mulligan of Berkeley.