Chris Jay Hoofnagle is senior counsel to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and director the organization's West Coast Office in San Francisco, California. He is admitted to practice in California, Washington, DC, and Maryland. He is a non-residential fellow with Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society.
He has testified before Congress, the California Legislature, and before the Judicial Conference of the United States on various privacy issues. He has commentated on privacy in hundreds of news stories in outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, and NPR.
He concentrates on consumer privacy issues, with a recent focus on financial services, gender and privacy, consumer profiling, the scourge of telemarketing, and new threats to privacy caused by invasive advertising models
He participated in the Amy Boyer case, where the New Hampshire Supreme Court held that information brokers and private investigators can be liable for the harms caused by selling personal information. In partnership with George Washington Law School Professor Daniel J. Solove, he is focusing attention on "commercial data brokers," companies that sell detailed dossiers to banks, businesses, law enforcement officers, and others outside the protections of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
His academic and advocacy writings on the First Amendment and privacy have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Knight Ridder News Service, Stanford University Press (forthcoming 2006), encyclopedias on privacy and civil liberties (forthcoming 2006), and in law journals at Columbia Law School, Notre Dame Law School, the University of North Carolina School of Law at Chapel Hill, and at the University of Illinois (forthcoming 2006).