Notice After Notice-and-Consent: Why Privacy Disclosures Are Valuable Even If Consent Frameworks Aren’t

Abstract

The dominant legal and regulatory approach to protecting information privacy is a form of mandated disclosure commonly known as “notice-and-consent.” Many have criticized this approach, arguing that privacy decisions are too complicated, and privacy disclosures too convoluted, for individuals to make meaningful consent decisions about privacy choices — decisions that often require us to waive important rights. While I agree with these criticisms, I argue that they only meaningfully call into question the “consent” part of notice-and-consent, and that they say little about the value of notice. We ought to decouple notice from consent, and imagine notice serving other normative ends besides readying people to make informed consent decisions.

Keywords: notice, notice-and-consent, consent, disclosure, mandated disclosure, privacy, information privacy, autonomy