Professor Gaia Bernstein Featured in Slate Magazine
Online web magazine, Slate, sspoke to Seton Hall Law professor and expert in law and
technology, Gaia Bernstein on Google's recent announcement to increase privacy protection.
From Slate:
When Google announced on Tuesday that it will bolster privacy protection online by
eventually scrapping third-party cookies, the immediate response was almost equal
parts praise, skepticism, and cynicism. The cacophony is fitting given the competing
interests of the three largest stakeholders involved: internet users, advertisers,
and Google itself.
Google’s motives are perhaps not as benevolent as Schuh claims. Chrome, which has almost
66 percent of the market, is not only under pressure from competing browsers—Safari
and Firefox already blocked third-party cookies in 2017 and 2019, respectively—but
also from data privacy laws. Gaia Bernstein, a Seton Hall law professor and director
of the Institute for Privacy Protection, told me that changes to the legal landscape—like
Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation and the newly implemented California Consumer
Privacy Act—are forcing companies like Google to portray themselves as leaders in
privacy. According to Bernstein, Google may be essentially saying “Hey! We’re regulating
ourselves, there’s no need to regulate us.”
“On its face, it sounds great,” Bernstein said. “I think the problem is we don’t really
have enough information of what they’re doing.”
Read What Google’s Latest Data Privacy Announcement Actually Means.