Chris Hoofnagle
Chris Jay Hoofnagle is senior staff attorney to the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic and senior fellow with the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. His focus is consumer privacy law. From 2000 to 2006, he was senior counsel to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). At EPIC, he concentrated on financial services privacy, telemarketing regulation and consumer profiling. He was also a non-residential fellow with Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society for the 2005 academic year.
Hoofnagle 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. Among his recent academic publications are “Putting Identity Theft on Ice: Freezing Credit Reports to Prevent Lending to Impostors” in Securing Privacy in An Internet Age (forthcoming 2006), “A Model Regime of Privacy Protection” in the University of Illinois Law Review (with J. Solove, 2006) and “Big Brother's Little Helpers: How ChoicePoint and Other Commercial Data Brokers Collect, Process, and Package Your Data for Law Enforcement” in the North Carolina Journal of International Law & Commercial Regulation (2004).