With financial and other personal information about us in countless databases, there is a pervasive concern in many countries that we have little control over access to potentially harmful uses of that information and that little can be done to address the problem except to give out as little information as possible and try our best to monitor our credit reports and financial accounts in an effort to detect unexpected activity if it occurs. By not enacting strong information privacy laws in the non-governmental sector, the U.S. Congress and the fifty states have effectively defaulted to a market-based model of privacy protection that relies heavily on individual self-policing and market incentives as the primary means of information control. A self-policing privacy protection model could be effective if a market for information privacy were possible-if well informed individuals could shop their privacy preferences effectively. This book examines the reasons why this is highly unlikely and why privacy laws in the United States (or the lack thereof) will not protect legitimate consumer interests in the years to come.
About the Author: Professor of Law and Cleon H. Foust Fellow, Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. Before joining the Indiana faculty, he was a partner in a law firm in Washington, D.C., and clerked for the Hon. Phyllis A. Kravitch on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Prof. Nehf has been teaching Secured Transactions, Commercial Paper, Contracts, and Consumer Law at Indiana and other law schools for more than twenty years. He speaks frequently on contract law, the Uniform Commercial Code, consumer finance, and information privacy and serves on the Executive Board of the International Consumer Law Association. He was the inaugural director of the European Law Program at Indiana University and has held several university administrative positions, including a term as director of the Indiana University Center on Southeast Asia. His publications include a major commercial law treatise (Secured Transactions Under the Uniform Commercial Code), an updated and revised edition of Corbin on Contracts, and numerous other books, chapters, and articles on commercial law, consumer finance, privacy law, low-income consumer transactions, and international/comparative law subjects. He currently serves as co-chair of the consumer law working group in the Cyberspace Committee of the American Bar Association (Business Law Section) and on the editorial board for the Markets and Law Series at Ashgate Publishing.