Omri Ben-Shahar (University of Chicago Law School)
Title: Privacy Protection, At What Cost?
Abstract: Data privacy protection is the dominant paradigm in the regulation of the digital economy. In this keynote lecture, University of Chicago Law Professor Omri Ben-Shahar challenges the adequacy of the data privacy paradigm. He argues that it fails to capture the most worrisome harms—what he calls 'data pollution'—which are inflicted against public rather than private interests. He further demonstrates that privacy-fueled restrictions on valuable data technologies impose a large, mostly unrecognized, harms on society.
Bio: Omri Ben-Shahar earned his PhD in Economics and SJD from Harvard in 1995 and his BA and LLB from the Hebrew University in 1990. Before coming to Chicago, he was the Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law and Economics at the University of Michigan. Prior to that, he taught at Tel-Aviv University, was a member of Israel's Antitrust Court, and clerked at the Supreme Court of Israel. He teaches contracts, sales, trademark law, insurance law, consumer law, sales law, e-commerce, food law, law and economics, and game theory and the law. He writes primarily in the fields of contract law and consumer protection. He is the co-author of Personalized Law: Different Rules for Different People (Oxford 2021, with Ariel Porat) and More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure (Princeton 2014, with Carl Schneider). Professor Ben-Shahar is the Kearney Director of the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics. He is also the Co-Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of Consumer Contracts.