Paul Schwartz

Groups at odds over possible privacy provisions in US-EU trade agreement

Paul Schwartz quoted in Bloomberg BNA, May 27, 2013 (registration required)

It is “interesting that privacy is going to be looked at under the rubric of e-commerce,” Paul Schwartz, University of California Berkeley School of Law professor and co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, told BNA…. The discussion about privacy will likely “become [ ] part of a larger e-commerce discussion” and thus will be a “much bigger discussion with different regulators,” he explained.

IRS high-tech tools track your digital footprints

Paul Schwartz quoted in US News & World Report, April 5, 2013

“I don’t really see strong legal regulation in place to manage something of this magnitude,” says Paul Schwartz, University of California law professor and co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. The IRS is working with the same kind of oversight and rules that were developed in the paper tax-return era, says Schwartz. But with the technology it now has, the agency can “see into people’s lives” as never before.

Report from the BCLT Privacy Law Conference in Palo Alto

Paul Schwartz cited in Datenschutz-Blog, April 2, 2013

From my perspective, a highlight was, in particular, the panel on “The EU-US Privacy Collision” on which Paul Schwartz (BCLT and Berkeley Law), Christopher Wolf (Hogan Lovells), Karl-Nicolas Peifer (University of Cologne) and Michael D. Hintze (Chief Privacy Counsel and Assistant General Counsel of Microsoft Corporation) were represented.

Surveillance tools at issue in lawsuit

Paul Schwartz quoted in The Wall Street Journal, (requires registration) July 15, 2012

Paul M. Schwartz … said the use of pen registers and trap-and-trace technology is likely up because the public is spending more time on smartphones and the Internet. … The data available to agencies is much broader than when investigators tracked phone calls to and from a single line, he said. “It’s not surprising they’re going to make use of it,” he said.

Paul Schwartz Compares European and US Privacy Concerns

San Francisco Chronicle, Dot.Commentary, February 10, 2012 by James Temple
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/10/BUJ31N4R67.DTL

In an interview, he said European—particularly German—perceptions are rooted in 19th century philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as well as the way private information was used against citizens under communist rule and dictators like Adolf Hitler. “Americans just feel more comfortable with this rough-and-tumble social discourse,” he said.

Paul Schwartz Taps Ngram to Chart Privacy and the Law

Policy by the Numbers, January 9, 2012 by Paul M. Schwartz & Daniel J. Solove
http://policybythenumbers.blogspot.com/2012/01/google-ngram-and-information-privacy.html

In our recent work, The PII Problem, we drew on the NGram viewer to gain a sense of peaks and valleys in policymakers’ attention to “information privacy” from 1950 to 2000…. From the 1990s on, the continuing use of the attention to “information privacy” reflected society’s growing concern with privacy in the PC and then Internet era.

Paul Schwartz Calls for Privacy Standards

Washington Internet Daily, January 5, 2012 by Kamala Lane
http://www.warren-news.com/widtrial.htm (registration required)

There should be incentives for companies “to keep information in the least identifiable form possible,” Schwartz said. Companies also should have an obligation “to track what happens to records after they’re released” and risk assessments are needed to figure out when that identifiable information is likely to become identified “and allow people to assess the levels of risk that follow.”