Faculty Profiles
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Chris Hoofnagle
Title: Lecturer in Residence, Director - Information Privacy Programs
Office: 424 Sutardja Dai Hall
Tel: 510-643-0213
Email Address: choofnagle@law.berkeley.edu
Chris Jay Hoofnagle is director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology's information privacy programs and senior fellow to the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. He is an expert in information privacy law.
Hoofnagle's recent work focuses on promoting competition among financial institutions to prevent identity theft. In Identity Theft: Making the Unknown Knowns Known, he discusses the problem of "synthetic identity theft," a form of crime where an impostor fabricates personal information and yet still can obtain credit accounts. Hoofnagle argues that the rise of this form of fraud demonstrates a fundamental failure in banks' anti-fraud gatekeeper function, and proposes market reforms for reducing identity theft.
With Jennifer King, Hoofnagle has started a consumer privacy survey research project. This project explores consumers' understanding of privacy and tests notions of consumer autonomy underlying existing self-regulatory privacy rules.
Hoofnagle has long called attention to the civil liberties risks posed by private-sector database companies. In Big Brother's Little Helpers, he argued that civil libertarians' focus on government behavior left private-sector firms free to create the very "federal data center" that the Privacy Act of 1974 was enacted to prevent. These ideas were presented in the Emmy award winning documentary, Big Brother, Big Business. After commercial database companies suffered security breaches, he articulated a framework for regulating the industry in A Model Regime of Privacy, with George Washington Law School Professor Daniel J. Solove.
Prior to joining Berkeley Law, Hoofnagle was a non-residential fellow with Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society. Prior to that, Hoofnagle focused on regulation of telemarketing, financial services privacy, and credit reporting at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC. He was the author of an amicus brief in Remsburg v. Docusearch, a case in which the Supreme Court of New Hampshire held that private investigators have a duty to exercise reasonable care towards individuals being investigated, and that individuals may bring common law privacy claims against investigators who acquire personal information through pretexting. He also authored an amicus brief in Kehoe v. Fidelity Federal Bank and Trust, in which the 11th Circuit held that individuals do not need to demonstrate harm to collect monetary damages from invasions of privacy. The decision makes it economically viable for individuals to vindicate privacy rights in court, and resulted in a $50 million settlement including direct payments to thousands of affected plaintiffs.
Hoofnagle co-chairs the annual Privacy Law Scholars Conference. He is licensed to practice in California and Washington, DC.
Education:
B.A., University of Georgia (1996)J.D., University of Georgia School of Law (2000)
