Thanks for the excellent and thoughtful review. The reason my solutions are sketched out so broadly is that I wanted to write for a non-legal audience and not get too bogged down in the kinds of policy details that make professors notorious.

The part of my solution regarding confidentiality is still in the process of being developed. I recently published an article with Neil Richards on the breach of confidentiality tort, Privacy’s Other Path: Recovering the Law of Confidentiality, 96 Georgetown Law Journal 123 (2007). We discuss the English version of the tort a lot, and that version does cover friends and family and has developed into a workable jurisprudence. Neil and I plan to write some follow-up articles that will sketch the full contours of the tort and examine some of the normative issues.

I do indeed plan to link to and respond to some of the reviews of my book on my blog once a few more are posted.

Regarding Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s review, I generally liked her review but was a bit annoyed that she seemed to think I was arguing that privacy ought to be protected like copyright. I explicitly stated (not once, but twice) that this was precisely not what I was arguing. I was only invoking copyright to counter the argument that it is impossible for the law to provide robust control over information. In my other work, I have argued that privacy should not be understood as a property right. So that part of the Fitzpatrick review ticked me off quite a bit, since I deliberately tried to be careful about what I was saying in the book.

More thoughts to follow. Your review is very interesting and thought-provoking, and I greatly appreciate your sharing your reactions about my book.

Dan