-San Francisco Chronicle, The Tech Chronicles, February 17, 2012 by James Temple
http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/author/jamestemple/

Apple operates from an entirely different frame.  Instead of spreading mediocre “free” products, the user pays for Apple products, and thus the customer is the consumer.  For Google and the cabal of “free” service providers out there, the customer is the advertising industry.

-San Francisco Chronicle, Dot.Commentary, February 18, 2012 by James Temple
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/17/BUSO1N9ASP.DTL

Chris Hoofnagle, a digital privacy expert at UC Berkeley’s law school, said there’s a corporate tone-deafness within the engineering-centric culture of Google that leads to these sorts of mistakes. “To the engineer, cookie blocking appears to be a technical error that they should try to solve,” he said. “It’s very difficult for them to accept the frame that some people do not want this tracking.”

San Jose Mercury News, January 3, 2012 by Mike Swift
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_19667554

“We found that consumers did not know where to file complaints, and when they did, many filed with industry-run groups,” Chris Hoofnagle, a lecturer at the Berkeley law school and an expert in information privacy law, said in an email. “Those groups almost never refer complaints to public authorities.”

The New York Times, November 14, 2011 by Somini Sengupta
http://nyti.ms/sCvkmr

“It’s convenient,” Mr. Hoofnagle said. “But do you want Facebook and Google to know where you’re going?”

The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 20, 2011 by Jeff Gelles
http://articles.philly.com/2011-10-20/business/30301830_1_verizon-and-verizon-wireless-privacy-policy-new-advertising-program

“The standard should be opt in,” Hoofnagle said. “If consumers really want more targeted advertising mediated from their own service provider, which they are directly paying, the service provider should get consent first.”

Data Privacy Monitor, September 2, 2011 by Craig Hoffman
http://www.dataprivacymonitor.com/behavioral-advertising/focus-on-behavioral-advertising-part-2/

The revised business guide should make clear that businesses should honor consumers’ expressed privacy preferences, and that businesses should not use technical means of any kind to circumvent or otherwise make ineffective consumers’ actions taken to protect their privacy.

-The Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2011 by Julia Angwin
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576508382675931492.html

Major websites such as MSN.com and Hulu.com have been tracking people’s online activities using powerful new methods that are almost impossible for computer users to detect, new research shows.… Separately last month, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, led by law professor Chris Hoofnagle, found supercookie techniques used by dozens of sites.

-San Francisco Chronicle, August 21, 2011 by James Temple
http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-08-21/business/29911051_1_cookies-online-privacy-online-marketers

Our study also found over 600 third-party hosts of cookies, most of which are not members of any self-regulatory organization (and thus aren’t bound to the rules of opt-out programs). They’re not even necessarily advertisers, they could be governments. We really don’t know who they are.

ClickZ, August 2, 2011 by Jack Marshall
http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2098796/tracking-methods-evade-user-control

Although KISSmetrics is not listed as a member of either of those initiatives, Hoofnagle suggested practices such as ETag tracking could severely undermine the efforts. “This is another example of tracking brought to light by researchers, rather than the industry self-regulatory groups…. It is unclear whether they have the technical expertise to engage in the surveillance and reverse engineering of new tracking methods,” he wrote in an email to ClickZ.

California Watch, June 20, 2011 by Erica Perez
http://bit.ly/k5D4sS

“At the most basic level, the FTC only has jurisdiction over acts in commerce,” Hoofnagle said in an e-mail. “Thus, for-profit educational institutions would be the easiest to reach, but state-run institutions, for both legal and political reasons, are not going to be pursued by the FTC.”

The Wall Street Journal, Digits blog, April 12, 2011
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/04/12/should-companies-self-regulate-on-privacy/tab/print/

Whether companies must honor opt-outs handled by third parties like Catalog Choice is a question that still hasn’t been determined, said Chris Hoofnagle of the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Hoofnagle, who has been advising Catalog Choice on legal matters, says that the organization is legally an “agent” for people requesting opt-outs.

The New York Times, March 28, 2011 by Miguel Helft and Matt Richtel
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/technology/29facebook.html?scp=2&sq=Berkeley&st=nyt

Mr. Schwartz said Facebook seemed to have learned quickly that demands for regulation would pile up, not just from users and advocacy groups, but from competitors. “What they’re doing is pragmatic, and it’s pragmatic to do it sooner rather than later,” he said.

“The practical implication is it’s going to make it more difficult for advocates to convince members of Congress that Facebook presents a privacy problem,” said Chris Jay Hoofnagle…. “One of the big points is to show lawmakers that Facebook is important to their own campaigns,” Mr. Hoofnagle said. “Once that fact is established, Congress will not touch Facebook.”

Business Insider, February 10, 2011 by Adam Levin
http://read.bi/hMKT7c

Frankly, the financial services sector has always been pretty guarded when it comes to such disclosures. UC Berkeley’s Professor Chris Hoofnagle has been quite outspoken over the years about their “close to the vest” disclosure policies, and his groundbreaking study tracking the frequency of bank data breaches is absolutely worth a read.

Washington Internet Daily, February 8, 2011 by Louis Trager
http://www.warren-news.com/internetservices.htm (registration required; go to H:\Law School in the News\In the News 2011\News Clips for article)

Chris Hoofnagle, the director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology’s information privacy programs, said a challenge had just been announced for developers to create apps to help users of mobile of devices understand and protect their privacy.

-The Daily Online Examiner, January 27, 2011 by Wendy Davis
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=143778

“We’ve tried voluntary codes for over a decade now, and in the privacy field, it hasn’t gone too well,” writes Berkeley Law’s Chris Hoofnagle. “In the absence of substantive privacy law, commercial data brokers created the very citizen databases that the Privacy Act of 1974 sought to prevent. The government can simply buy data on its citizens now instead of collecting it directly.”

-National Journal, Tech Daily Dose, January 28, 2011 by Juliana Gruenwald
http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2011/01/groups-firms-weigh-in-on-priva.php

Noting that FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz has pushed Congress to provide the FTC with greater rulemaking authority, Hoofnagle said in his comments that, “The Department of Commerce should support these initiatives in order to bolster its narrative surrounding FTC enforcement.”

CNBC, The Facebook Obsession, January 6, 2011 Host Lester Holt
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1707620781&play=1

“We don’t have a clear idea of what Facebook will ultimately do with this data.”

The Wall Street Journal, Digits Blog, November 30, 2010 by Julia Angwin
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/11/30/a-new-type-of-tracking-akamais-pixel-free-technology/

Privacy advocates say companies like content-delivery networks and search providers have a lot of data at their fingertips that could be useful in advertising. Akamai “has access to an astonishing amount of Web traffic” and thus could track many users, says Chris Jay Hoofnagle.

KQED-FM, November 18, 2010 Host Kelly Wilkinson
http://www.kqed.org/a/californiamoney/R201011180733

“The idea would be that you would change a setting in your browser, and then once you’ve made that setting change, all the various companies out there that track people online would have to stop tracking you.”

PC World, October 13, 2010 by Mark Sullivan
http://bit.ly/9sI75b

“Buzz was a direct reaction to the possible disintermediation of Google by Twitter and Facebook,” says Chris Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. “It was Google’s way of keeping people from switching to Facebook or Twitter as their default communication vehicle on the Web.”

The Wall Street Journal, Digits Blog, October 7, 2010 by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/10/07/former-ftc-employee-files-complaint-over-google-privacy/

A former Federal Trade Commission employee has filed a complaint with the agency accusing Google Inc. of not adequately protecting the privacy of consumers’ search queries…. “I think what is interesting about his complaint is not the legal theory. It’s the machinations and the colloquy between Google and advertisers that no normal person would ever know about,” he said.

The Wall Street Journal, September 24, 2010 by Jennifer Valentino-Devries
http://bit.ly/duVug4

One FTC watcher, Berkeley Law School professor Chris Jay Hoofnagle, says he expects FTC report to suggest that Congress needs to act to protect consumers. “I don’t think the FTC is going to announce rules. I think they will call upon Congress to direct them to make rules,” he said.

-The Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2010 by Jennifer Valentino-Devries and Emily Steel
http://bit.ly/dqtirq

The tools cited in the suits are part of an “arms race” in tracking technologies, said Chris Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology’s information-privacy programs. Some users, uncomfortable with tracking, now routinely block or delete cookies. “There are some in the industry who do not believe that users should be able to block tracking, so they are turning to increasingly sophisticated tools to track people,” he said.

-The New York Times, September 20, 2010 by Tanzina Vega
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/technology/21cookie.html?_r=3&src=busln

Chris Jay Hoofnagle, 36, one of the authors of a University of California, Berkeley, study about Internet privacy and Flash cookies that has been used in several of the legal filings, said the recent spate of suits pointed to a weakness in federal rules governing online privacy. “Consumer privacy actions have largely failed,” Mr. Hoofnagle said. The lawsuits, he added, “actually are moving the policy ball forward in the ways that activists are not.”