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A Stanford Law School Symposium: Securing Privacy in the Internet Age

UPDATE: Registration closes 2/20/04.

What legal regimes or market initiatives would best prevent the unauthorized disclosure of private information while also promoting business innovation?

March 13-14 2004
Stanford Law School

As individuals do more – shopping, talking, working – on-line, they leave private information behind in databases stored on Internet-connected servers. Companies store proprietary data on networked servers connected to the Internet. Computer security experts struggle to develop technology and best practices to protect this information from unauthorized intruders or inadvertent leaks. Are private initiatives sufficient to protect private and confidential information, or should the law allocate the responsibility of keeping the server secure, and if so, on whom? And will the imposition of this legal and economic burden impede further exponential advances like those the computer industry has made in the past decade?

The Law, Science and Technology Program (LST) and the Center for Internet and Society (CIS) at Stanford Law School invite you to join us at a symposium where the speakers will present papers that address the ways in which application of various legal doctrines could induce software vendors, hardware companies and system administrators to adopt security-enhancing practices, report unauthorized disclosures of private information, properly value and remedy harm flowing from privacy breaches, while promoting vigorous competition and innovation.

The event is funded by a generous grant from the cy pres fund established in the Supnick et al. v. Amazon.com, Inc. and Alexa Internet, Inc. litigation. After an open call for papers produced close to a hundred submissions, the authors were chosen by the symposium editors. The papers will be published in the fall in a scholarly volume.

The Symposium Editors are:

• Anupam Chander, Professor, UC Davis School of Law, Visiting Professor Stanford Law School, Spring 2004
• Lauren Gelman, Assistant Director, Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School
• Margaret Jane Radin, Wm. Benjamin Scott and Luna M. Scott Professor of Law, Director, Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology

This Symposium is appropriate for anyone interested in developing a legal regime that better promotes computer security than our current one. The authors represent a wide variety of viewpoints: academics, policy makers, economists, advocates, and legal and corporate professionals, and we anticipate the audience will reflect this diversity as well.

Registration is now closed.

Conference Audio

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