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101 Calif. L. Rev. 1 (2013)
The Case for Online Obscurity

handle is hein.journals/calr101 and id is 9 raw text is: California Law Review VOL. 101 FEBRUARY 2013 No. I Copyright © 2013 by California Law Review, Inc., a California Nonprofit Corporation The Case for Online Obscurity Woodrow Hartzog* and Frederic Stutzman** On the Internet, obscure information has a minimal risk of being discovered or understood by unintended recipients. Empirical research demonstrates that Internet users rely on obscurity perhaps more than anything else to protect their privacy. Yet, online obscurity has been largely ignored by courts and lawmakers. In this Article, we argue that obscurity is a critical component of online privacy, but it has not been embraced by courts and lawmakers because it has never been adequately defined or conceptualized. This lack of definition has resulted in the concept of online obscurity being too insubstantial to serve as a helpful guide in privacy disputes. In its place, courts and lawmakers have generally found that the unfettered ability of any hypothetical individual to find and access information on the Internet renders that information public, and therefore ineligible for privacy Copyright © 2013 California Law Review, Inc. California Law Review, Inc. (CLR) is a California nonprofit corporation. CLR and the authors are solely responsible for the content of their publications. * Assistant Professor of Law, Cumberland School of Law at Samford University; Affiliate Scholar, Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. ** Visiting Assistant Professor, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The authors would like to thank Alessandro Acquisti, Gaia Bernstein, Will DeVries, Tony Fargo, Lauren Gelman, Joe Hall, Chris Hoofnagle, Airi Lampinen, William McGeveran, Helen Nissenbaum, Neil Richards, Sasha Romanosky, Daniel Solove, the Future of Privacy Forum, the faculty at H. John Heinz III College at Carnegie Mellon University, Samford University's Cumberland School of Law, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the participants of workshops hosted by Microsoft Research New England, the CYLAB Usable Privacy and Security Lab, the Privacy Law Scholars Conference, the Yale Information Society Project, and the International Association of Privacy Professionals. This research was generously funded by the Cumberland School of Law, the Roy H. Park Fellowship, the Margaret E. Kalp Fellowship and the IWT SBO Project on Security and Privacy for Online Social Networks (SPION). I

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