Peter A Clarke

David Solove is an academic and  prolific writer on privacy issues.  Amongst his writings are  Nothing to Hide, The false Tradeoff between Privacy and Security and the Future of Reputation. He is an influential commentator on privacy issues in the USA and a strong advocate for improved privacy protections there.  A difficult challenge at the best of times.

His paper Privacy Self-Management and the Consent Paradox will be published in the forthcoming edition of the Harvard Law Review (Volume 126 2013).  In short compass (not easy with a 19 Harvard Review article) it considers the operation of the privacy self management model and issues of consent and the concept of opting in.

The conclusion provides:

For far too long, privacy law has been relying too heavily upon the privacy self-management model. This model cannot achieve the goals demanded of it, and it has been pushed beyond its limits. The model should not be abandoned, as it has many virtues. An alternative regime would likely be too paternalistic.
At the core of so many privacy issues is the problem of consent, and far too often, law, policy, and scholarship ignore it. The way forward involves (1) developing a coherent approach to consent, one that accounts for the social science discoveries about how humans make decisions about personal data; and (2) developing more substantive privacy rules. These are enormous challenges, but they must be tackled. Otherwise, privacy law will remain stunted while the problems it must deal with grow larger and more out of control.

The whole article is is found here.