Professor Gaia Bernstein Featured in Slate Magazine

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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.