Professor Paul M. Schwartz’s article “Privacy and/or Trade,” which was just published in the University of Chicago Law Review, has been named one of this year’s winners of the 13th annual Privacy Papers for Policymakers awards. Given by the nonprofit Future of Privacy Forum, the awards recognize scholarship that’s useful to policymakers within the United States Congress, federal agencies, and international data protection authorities.
The winners will present their work at an event hosted by the organization in Washington, D.C., in February.
The article, co-authored with Georgetown Professor Anupam Chander, traces the way international privacy and trade law, which were developed together, have diverged and now are in clear conflict with one another.
“Will trade be the death of data privacy, as international flows of personal information across the world place our privacy at risk?” they ask. “Or will data privacy be the death of trade, as restrictions on information flows make modern trade increasingly difficult?”
In a major empirical finding, Schwartz and Chander find that 61 countries outside the EU have created their own “adequacy” standards for international data transfers. This splintering of the adequacy approach threatens global data trade. In response, Schwartz and Chander propose a number of policy approaches, including the development of a global privacy agreement, which would be hammered out by the World Trade Organization to protect privacy while avoiding the possibility of different countries throttling the movement of data.