CCT Adjunct Faculty Mark MacCarthy's paper published in I/S
Privacy policy has always based itself on either a utilitarian, economist’s perspective, weighing the harm of privacy invasions against the gains or on a human rights perspective, where privacy is a fundamental right that trumps ordinary economic interests. A third sociological perspective expressed most clearly in the work of Helen Nissenbaum says that privacy is an aspect of social structure, aiming to preserve important social relationships. But this perspective hasn’t been easy to apply in a policy context. In the 2016 Privacy Law Scholars Conference, CCT’s Dr. Mark MacCarthy workshopped a paper attempting to make this contextual view of privacy relevant to the policymaking process. The paper, Privacy Policy and Contextual Harm, was just published in the current edition of I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society.