Forget Me Not: What the EU’s New Internet Privacy Ruling Means for the United States – with Abraham Newman

The modern innovators of Internet human rights are not U.S. leaders or bold Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. They are stodgy bureaucrats, politicians, and lawyers in Brussels, Berlin, and Strasbourg. As the National Security Agency (NSA) and American firms have relied on sucking up massive amounts of data to observe citizens and create and serve consumers, the European Union has fought to establish privacy rights. Over the last ten years, however, the EU initiative seemed to be on the ropes as the United States pressed Europeans to water down their privacy protections in a number of key sectors. But now, the

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “Forget Me Not: What the EU’s New Internet Privacy Ruling Means for the United States,”Foreign Affairs (2014, website only).

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Other Writing:

Academic Article

The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism – with Marion Fourcade

This short piece compares 21st century machine learning to 19th and 20th century bureaucracy – we hope to write more. While people in and around the tech industry debate whether algorithms are political at all, social scientists take the politics as a given, asking instead how this politics unfolds: how algorithms concretely govern. What we ...
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Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Global Institutions without a Global State,” in the Oxford Handbook on Historical Institutionalism – with Martha Finnemore – eds. Orfeo Fioretos, Tulia Falletti and Adam Sheingate

Historical institutionalism has not yet grappled with the deeper intellectual challenges of “going global.” Understanding international, particularly global, institutions, requires attention to and theorizing of a global social context, one that does not rely on a national government in the background, ready to enforce laws and rules. It also requires theories about the global organizations ...
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