An article by Fordham Law Professor Chinmayi Sharma, Fordham Law student Sam Adler ’26, and University of Georgia School of Law Professor Thomas E. Kadri—titled “Brokering Safety,” forthcoming in the California Law Review—was summarized on Legal Theory Blog.
For victims of abuse, safety means hiding. Not just hiding themselves, but also hiding their contact details, their address, their workplace, their roommates, and any other information that could enable their abuser to target them. Yet today, no number of name changes and relocations can prevent data brokers from sharing a victim’s personal information online. Thanks to brokers, abusers can find what they need with a single search, a few clicks, and a few dollars. For many victims, then, the best hope for safety lies in obscurity—that is, making themselves and their information harder to find.
This Article exposes privacy law’s complicity in this phenomenon of “brokered abuse.” Today, victims seeking obscurity can ask data brokers to remove their online information. But a web of privacy laws props up a fragmented and opaque system that forces victims to navigate potentially hundreds of distinct opt-out processes, wait months for their information to be removed, and then repeat this process continuously to ensure their information doesn’t resurface. The status quo compels victims to manage their own privacy, placing the burden of maintaining obscurity on already-overburdened shoulders.
In response, this Article pitches a new regulatory regime premised on a transformative reallocation of responsibility. In short, it proposes a techno-legal system that would enable victims to obscure their information across all data brokers with a single request, redistributing the burden away from victims and onto brokers. Such a system is justified, feasible, and constitutional—despite what brokers might say. The industry is eager to assert that it has a First Amendment right to exploit people’s data, but this Article develops a trio of arguments to confront this controversial claim of corporate power. By blending theory, policy, and technical design, this Article charts a path toward meaningful privacy protections for victims and, ultimately, a more empathetic legal landscape for those most at risk.
Read “Sharma, Kadri, & Adler on Data Brokers and Safety for Abuse Victims” on Legal Theory Blog.
