Chris Jay Hoofnagle is an American professor at the University of California, Berkeley who teaches information privacy law, computer crime law, regulation of online privacy, internet law, and seminars on new technology. Hoofnagle has contributed to the privacy literature by writing privacy law legal reviews and conducting research on the privacy preferences of Americans. Notably, his research demonstrates that most Americans prefer not to be targeted online for advertising and despite claims to the contrary, young people care about privacy and take actions to protect it. Hoofnagle has written scholarly articles regarding identity theft, consumer privacy, U.S. and European privacy laws, and privacy policy suggestions.
Career
Hoofnagle is a professor and attorney at Gunderson Dettmer LLP. He has served as an advisor for several student projects at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information. He advised Ashkan Soltani and his colleagues on their article "Flash Cookies and Privacy".
Hoofnagle and Soltani published a follow-up on this work in 2011 documenting the use of "HTTP ETags" to store persistent identifiers. This research was also published in the Harvard Policy Law Review as "Behavioral Advertising: The Offer You Cannot Refuse," and won the CPDP 2014 Multidisciplinary Privacy Research Award.
Privacy literature contributions
Identity theft
Today, most information regarding identity theft incidents is gathered from the victims whose identities are being stolen. As a result, many aspects regarding identity theft are still unknown. This is because of missing data on synthetic identity theft (situations of identity theft where victims aren't aware of the crime), the fact that most victims don't report identity theft to criminal authorities, and the fact that the FBI may decline to investigate identity theft cases due to lack of resources. In fact, less than one in 32 victims of identity theft file an official complaint on the issue.
Because of these issues, Hoofnagle argues that identity theft information should be gathered from financial institutions. Financial institutions are a central actor during identity theft crimes as they are the institution that imposters use to steal money, they undergo nonpayment after imposters steal money, and they recharge victims after nonpayment. Thus, financial institutions have the most interaction with the imposter, which makes them the best player to gather information about identity theft, according to Hoofnagle. Hoofnagle believes that financial institutions should be required to track the number of identity theft instances that taken place or been avoided, identify the targeted product of the thief, and report the loss suffered or avoided. He argues that these policies will garner more information regarding identity theft, helping institutions avoid the problem in the future.
Hoofnagle's research also discovered that larger institutions that focused on credit card accounts had relatively higher rates of identity fraud than smaller institutions. He argues that this may contradict consumer expectations, as consumers may believe that larger institutions have the tools necessary to avoid identity fraud problems.
Consumer privacy
Social networking services
Although signing up for social networking services (SNSs) like Instagram and Facebook do not cost any money to access, Hoofnagle argues that there is a great price for this transaction: the collection of personal information. As consumers post more on SNSs, the SNSs gather more and more personal information on the consumer. Data can be collected directly by tracking the smartphone owner's posts or storing information from other phone applications on the device. It can also be collected indirectly from information that other people store about the smartphone owner on their own devices. Hoofnagle argues that this transaction represents a loss of privacy for consumers. By freely revealing personal information, consumers leave themselves more vulnerable to data collection, identity theft, fraud, and stalking.
Additionally, consumers do not know how their information will be used in the future. It is almost impossible to delete information that has been posted on SNSs, and consumers do not know how that information will be dealt with.
Internet tracking
There are many methods of internet tracking, including Flash cookies, ETags, HTML5 local storage, Evercookies, and browser fingerprinting. In a study, Hoofnagle discovered that there was a dramatic increase in the use of standard cookies between 2009 and 2011. Additionally, most cookies were placed by third-party hosts, which is mainly made up of advertisers.