Tech Policy Research and Education Hub Speaker Series: “How Can Empiricism Improve Privacy Enforcement?”
Date/Time: Wednesday, March 12, 2025 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Location: Virtual
UMD students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends—join us for the Tech Policy Research and Education Hub Speaker Series. (Registration Required)
Abstract:
The effectiveness of privacy law is constantly challenged by evolving technologies, as well as governmental and corporate strategies. Industries seek to maximize data collection, often at the expense of privacy, and apply minimum privacy safeguards to satisfy legal requirements rather than provide meaningful privacy protections for their consumers. Governments pose threats on privacy as well, collecting personal data to achieve control and operational objectives with questionable checks and balances. At the same time, civil society and academics develop tools and produce empirical findings that may inform privacy gatekeepers and improve compliance. But to what extent are they successful? In this talk, Harvard Law Professor Nielsen and French Data Protection Authority CNIL’s Dr. Arfaoui will share insights from their research and practical experience with US & EU privacy law. They will discuss cases and projects that uncover limits and opportunities for academics to inform regulators and decision makers who apply privacy law. In some settings, empirical research findings are clear, but social and organizational obstacles make it difficult to adopt them. In others, there is uncertainty among researchers but a pressing need to regulate market harms. We will discuss the link between privacy research and privacy law from a comparative perspective, across US & EU privacy regimes.
Bios:
Aileen Nielsen
Aileen Nielsen is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard Law School, where she teaches privacy law and torts. Her research focuses on the interplay of law and technology, drawing on empirical methods and private law topics. She holds degrees in anthropology, physics, and law. She has written two trade books on machine learning and has also worked in industry as a data scientist. She is a member of the New York bar.
Mehdi Arfaoui
Mehdi Arfaoui is a sociologist at the CNIL’s Digital Innovation Lab (LINC), where his research focuses on the intersection of technology, regulation, and digital practices. A key area of his current work examines the interactions between science and regulation, exploring the dynamic relationship between academic research and regulatory bodies, particularly concerning personal data protection. He is also a research associate at the Centre d’étude des mouvements sociaux (CEMS) of the EHESS, where he carried his PhD thesis. His broader research interests include the modernization of public action, platform work, and the political sociology of data.
Speaker(s): Aileen Nielsen, Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard Law School; Mehdi Arfaoui, Sociologist at the CNIL’s Digital Innovation Lab (LINC)