Chris Jay Hoofnagle is an American professor at the University of California, Berkeley who teaches information privacy law, computer crime law, regulation of online privacy, and internet law. Hoofnagle has contributed to the privacy literature through a set of surveys that establish that most Americans prefer not to be targeted online for advertising and that, despite claims to the contrary, young people care about privacy and take actions to protect it. Hoofnagle is the author of Federal Trade Commission Privacy Law and Policy, a history of the FTC's consumer protection and privacy efforts.
Career
Hoofnagle has served as an advisor for several student projects at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information. He advised Ashkan Soltani and his colleagues on their article "Flash Cookies and Privacy". Hoofnagle and Soltani published a follow-up on this work in 2011 documenting the use of "HTTP ETags" to store persistent identifiers. This research was also published in the Harvard Policy Law Review as "Behavioral Advertising: The Offer You Cannot Refuse," and won the CPDP 2014 Multidisciplinary Privacy Research Award.
Notable works
Hoofnagle has used research to propose policy solutions to privacy problems such as requiring lending institutions and payment firms to publicly report their internal statistics on fraud and identity theft. In 2007, the New York Times wrote about Hoofnagle's work on curbing identify theft. Early in his career, he wrote an article highlighting the trend of federal law enforcement to use data aggregators to collect and analyze data on citizens. This work was featured in Robert O'Harrow's book No Place to Hide. More recently, Hoofnagle has researched the consumer protection implications of "free" online services. With co-author Jan Whittington, Hoofnagle published two articles on free business models: "Unpacking Privacy's Price" and "The Price of 'Free': Accounting for the Cost of the Internet's Most Popular Price". Hoofnagle is a member of the American Association of University Professors, and serves on its committee on Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications. He has been a strong critic of academic outsourcing of communications to services such as Google Apps for Education.
The Hoofnagle brothers, a lawyer and a physiologist from the United States, who have done much to develop the concept of denialism, have defined it as the employment of rhetorical arguments to give the appearance of legitimate debate where there is none, an approach that has the ultimate goal of rejecting a proposition on which a scientific consensus exists.
Key to this development was a widely read paper titled Denialists' Deck of Cards: An Illustrated Taxonomy of Rhetoric Used to Frustrate Consumer Protection Efforts in which he describes denialism as "the use of rhetorical techniques and predictable tactics to erect barriers to debate and consideration of any type of reform regardless of the facts". Hoofnagle has been also a strong critic of libertarian public policy groups, arguing that they create outcomes that are neither pro-libertarian nor pro-consumer.
