On Privacy and Technology

A quarter century of privacy-law scholarship compressed into 136 pages, and readers arriving from the doorstop competition notice the ratio: "It is much shorter than Zuboff’s great book but it packs quite a punch." The punch starts on the first page, "technology per se isn’t the enemy. I love technology," clearing the alarmism out of the way before the argument begins. And the argument runs on images a legislator could repeat: one reader "loved the milk comparison he used to describe how people should be able to place our trust on companies," because nobody tests their own milk for poison, and nobody should have to police their own data alone. Hence the wish for copies to "magically appear on the desk of every member of Congress in short order."

The freshest privacy scandal this 2025 book reaches for dates to the Clinton administration: "Just a Monica Lewinsky story." That, plus the Target pregnancy-ads chestnut, while the fights readers wanted covered go missing: "No mention of how surveillance and internet sleuths used footage and accused a few innocent people of storming the capitol on January 6th," nothing on China's face-recognition social credit, nothing on writers' work scraped to train AI. When the book does get political it plays favorites: "the description of identical behavior as antisocial 'doxxing' (p. 18) when done to the in-group and heroic 'unmasking' (p. 80) when done to the out-group." And the remedy amounts to "badger your legislators to give bureaucrats and administrative law judges more latitude to punish entities they don't like anyway."