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Ignacio Cofone

@ignaciocofone.bsky.social
1.1K followers 234 following 87 posts

Prof of Law & Regulation of AI at @oxfordlawfac.bsky.social @ox.ac.uk. Books: "The Privacy Fallacy" (2023) "Canadian Privacy Law" (2026). Likes tech, dogs, and sustainable industrial policy

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Reposted by Ignacio Cofone
Lawfare @lawfaremedia.org · 22/09/2026
A publishing house in Munich is running scams, according to Google's AI overview. The issue with the allegation: none of it was in any of the sources linked. A court in Germany has now ordered Google to answer for these apparent falsehoods. @ignaciocofone.bsky.social breaks down the case.
lawfaremedia.org
AI Overviews and the Limits of the Search Safe Harbor
A regional court in Germany ordered Google to answer for apparent falsehoods about a Munich publishing house provided by its AI overview feature.
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danielequercia.bsky.social @danielequercia.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
#ResponsibleAI Talk Three Models of AI Regulation Speaker: @ignaciocofone.bsky.social, University of Oxford Date: June 20, 2026 Time: 3:30pm (London) To join online, send empty email, subject “Subscribe RAI” to daniele.quercia@gmail.com
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Reposted by Ignacio Cofone
Just Security @justsecurity.org · 30/06/2026
Providers, not regulators, are increasingly setting the standards against which their own AI systems are measured, writes @ignaciocofone.bsky.social (Ignacio Cofone).
justsecurity.org
The Handover of AI Standard-Setting
Providers, not regulators, are increasingly setting the standards against which their own AI systems are measured.
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Thomas Kadri @thomaskadri.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Finally, in “Inference, Abuse, and the Limits of Privacy Law,” @ignaciocofone.bsky.social highlights how our article “exposes the misalignment between where privacy law places responsibility and where the conditions of harm are actually produced.” www.californialawreview.org/online/infer...
californialawreview.org
Inference, Abuse, and the Limits of Privacy Law — California Law Review
Brokering Safety identifies a failure of privacy law: the tendency to allocate responsibility to individuals through opt-out and deletion rights, even as informational harm is generated by distribute...
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Sam Adler @samadler.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
It is an honor to have not one, not two, but three world class essays responding to Brokering Safety. Go check out @evanselinger.bsky.social & @hartzog.bsky.social, @oliviersylvain.bsky.social, and @ignaciocofone.bsky.social’s essays for @califlrev.bsky.social!
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Reposted by Ignacio Cofone
CDTS | CLTS • uOttawa @cdtsuottawaclts.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
We were delighted to host @ignaciocofone.bsky.social, in conversation with @teresascassa.bsky.social, about his new book " Canadian Privacy Law: Cases and Comparative Materials", exploring how legal frameworks are evolving to address the challenges of privacy in the digital age.
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Reposted by Ignacio Cofone
The Information Society Project at Yale Law School @yaleisp.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
Congrats to @ignaciocofone.bsky.social fone on Canadian Privacy Law: Cases and Materials (Emond Publishing), a casebook comprehensively covering Canada’s privacy framework across private law, statutes, and the Charter. Great to see this out! emond.ca/Store/Books/...
emond.ca
Canadian Privacy Law: Cases and Comparative Materials | Emond Publishing
Browse Emond's full collection of books for Canadian law school, college, and university programs, as well as legal practice.
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Reposted by Ignacio Cofone
CDTS | CLTS • uOttawa @cdtsuottawaclts.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
Join us on May 1st for a conversation with @ignaciocofone.bsky.social around his new book Canadian Privacy Law exploring how legal frameworks are evolving to address the challenges of privacy in the digital age. ℹ️/🎟 www.uottawa.ca/research-inn...
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Carissa Véliz @carissaveliz.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
Being on the TED stage has been one of the biggest thrills of my life. My TED talk is live! Please share widely! Predictions can be weapons of power, and we are being much too naive about them, from prediction markets to AI. #Prophecy www.ted.com/talks/cariss...
ted.com
Beware the power of prediction
What do the story of Oedipus and your insurance premiums have in common? They are both driven by self-fulfilling prophecies. Philosopher and TED Fellow Carissa Véliz traces the hidden power of predict...
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Reposted by Ignacio Cofone
CDTS | CLTS • uOttawa @cdtsuottawaclts.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Join us on May 1st for a conversation with @ignaciocofone.bsky.social around his new book Canadian Privacy Law exploring how legal frameworks are evolving to address the challenges of privacy in the digital age. ℹ️/🎟 www.uottawa.ca/research-inn...
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
And because disclosure doesn't have to be all-or-nothing (it can be staged, partial, or mediated through auditors), the domain of genuinely justifiable opacity turns out to be much narrower than secrecy claims suggest.
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
They serve a second function: they reveal whether the decision-maker aligns the algorithm with the public interest or uses opacity to shield self-serving design choices. Where those patterns suggest misalignment, the paper proposes rebuttable presumptions favoring disclosure.
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
The paper develops a test for when disclosure obligations should apply even when gaming or trade secrecy concerns exist. Courts and regulators already look at error patterns and outcome distributions across groups, but typically as evidence of bias.
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
We started this project ~6 years ago after "Strategic Games & Algorithmic Secrecy". Gaming & trade secrecy are standard justifications for AI opacity, but they mask self-serving behavior by decision-makers who benefit from opacity for reasons that have nothing to do with either
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
Very glad my paper with Katherine Strandburg, "Algorithmic Opacity as a Principal-Agent Problem," is now forthcoming in the NYU Journal of Intellectual Property papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
Algorithmic Opacity as a Principal-Agent Problem
<p><span>Principal-agent problems are central to debates over algorithmic transparency, but have been underexplored. Concerns about gaming and trade secrecy, fr
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Reposted by Ignacio Cofone
The Information Society Project at Yale Law School @yaleisp.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Two new articles by ISP fellow @ignaciocofone.bsky.social : The Privacy Paradox Is a Misnomer: Data Under Structural Uncertainty : papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... -and- Consent, Design, and Deceit: A Bottom-up Proposal for Regulating Dark Patterns: Link: ssrn.com/abstract=569...
papers.ssrn.com
The Privacy Paradox Is A Misnomer: Data Under Structural Uncertainty
The infamous privacy paradox refers to the apparent inconsistency between people's stated concern for privacy and their readiness to disclose personal informati
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
Really glad to see this piece published. Stav does something the control debate in privacy law needed: she disaggregates the critiques, showing they operate at diff levels & the relevant arguments are different. Highly recommend it to anyone with views in favor or against control/consent in privacy
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
The focus is on how Privacy Law actually works (and why it’s a field): how consent operates across contexts, how regimes like PIPEDA relate to public and private law, and how similar problems arise across domains. emond.ca/Store/Books/...
emond.ca
Canadian Privacy Law: Cases and Comparative Materials | Emond Publishing
Browse Emond's full collection of books for Canadian law school, college, and university programs, as well as legal practice.
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
Thrilled that Canadian Privacy Law: Cases and Comparative Materials is now published by Emond. It comes out of six years of teaching Privacy Law at McGill and it's the first casebook to cover Canadian Privacy Law as a whole, integrating torts, statutes, criminal law, and constitutional law
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Thanks for sharing them!
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The Information Society Project at Yale Law School @yaleisp.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
At this week’s Ideas Lunch, we were delighted to host Prof. @ignaciocofone.bsky.social and Prof. Katherine Strandburg for a fascinating talk on “Algorithmic Opacity as a Principal-Agent Problem.” Thank you both for such a thoughtful discussion.
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Just Security @justsecurity.org · 09/02/2026
The UK and France’s response to the Grok deepfake case suggests that effective AI regulation may not come from comprehensive AI-specific frameworks, but from the proper application of existing harm-based approaches to new capabilities, writes @ignaciocofone.bsky.social:
justsecurity.org
Grok, Deepfakes, and the Collapse of the Content/Capability Distinction
The Grok case suggests that effective AI regulation may come not from comprehensive AI-specific frameworks, but from applying existing harm-based laws to new capabilities.
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Thank you!
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Ryan Fritsch @upsideofdown.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Can’t wait to read this! For our part the @lco-cdo.bsky.social 2024 Consumer Protection Project recommended Ontario regulate consumer notice to include “market contexts” - plain language descriptions of systems & real risks ie “structural uncertainties.” See p 33-36: www.lco-cdo.org/wp-content/u...
lco-cdo.org
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
TLDR: people agree to data practices while valuing privacy because risk is indeterminate at the time of agreement
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Regulators: treat consent as contingent on uncertainty reduction, with notices that focus on risks rather than technical aspects. Shift focus to redesigning the decision environment: away from attention to default settings and towards whether the decision environment makes harms legible
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
This shifts the problem from self-control to information conditions, which operate as a market failure. Because structural uncertainty drives agreement contrary to preferences, good laws reduce uncertainty and keeps choices flexible
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Happy to share “The Privacy Paradox is a Misnomer: Data Under Structural Uncertainty” (GTLJ 2026) which empirically shows uncertainty about downstream data uses and consequences, rather than unstable or contradictory preferences, drives the so-called privacy paradox papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
The Privacy Paradox Is A Misnomer: Data Under Structural Uncertainty
The infamous privacy paradox refers to the apparent inconsistency between people's stated concern for privacy and their readiness to disclose personal informati
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Reposted by Ignacio Cofone
The Information Society Project at Yale Law School @yaleisp.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
ISP Fellow @ignaciocofone.bsky.social publishes in Iowa Law Review about "Taxonomizing Synthetic Data for Law" papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
Taxonomizing Synthetic Data for Law
Synthetic data is increasingly important in data usage and AI design, creating novel legal and policy dilemmas. All too often, discussions of synthetic data tre
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
Some implications: privacy risks include both leakage and group-based inferences; data quality depends on valid assumptions; competition effects vary by type. Regulators should check the ground-truth claims that synthetic data encodes when differentiating among types
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
Ground-truth taxonomy based on G&L: (1) transformed data modifies collected data for an end use; (2) augmented data adds to collected data from modeled structure often to improve fidelity; (3) simulated data is generated from background models rather than records
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
Happy to share our new piece with Katherine Strandburg & Nicholas Tilmes, “Taxonomizing Synthetic Data for Law.” It engages Gal & Lynskey’s excellent article & centers the role of ground-truth assumptions. The key q is how creation methods encode claims about the world ssrn.com/abstract=555...
papers.ssrn.com
Taxonomizing Synthetic Data for Law
Synthetic data is increasingly important in data usage and AI design, creating novel legal and policy dilemmas. All too often, discussions of synthetic data tre
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Reposted by Ignacio Cofone
Rebecca Crootof @crootof.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
As many know, @bjard.bsky.social and I have been drafting a Technology Law coursebook for a few years. We've used it to teach classes at three institutions, including Yale Law School, and others have used chapters in their techlaw classes. We're excited to share the current version more broadly!
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Claudia Haupt @cehaupt.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
Always read @ignaciocofone.bsky.social, including accidental legal history.
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Mark Lemley @marklemley.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
My article "Protecting Consumers in a Post-Consent World," about how we can broaden antitrust and consumer protection to deal with the fact that we have abandoned notice and consent in contract law, is now published in the Stanford Law Review Online. www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/prote...
stanfordlawreview.org
Protecting Consumers in a Post-Consent World | Stanford Law Review
In Charting a New Course on Digital Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, former FTC Chair Lina Khan and her co-authors Samuel Levine a
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
As other recent news of death by suicide, this shows CSR in AI requires building products that avoid fostering addiction and are less parasocial. Reducing sycophancy and downplaying the illusion of personality mitigates risks of unhealthy AI reliance www.theglobeandmail.com/business/com...
theglobeandmail.com
Opinion: Don’t hate ChatGPT-5. Your chatbot is not your friend
The reaction to OpenAI’s new GPT-5 system shows the risks of making a chatbot too humanlike
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
New op-ed: Many users were distraught over OpenAI’s shift from GPT-4o to GPT-5, describing the change as “losing a friend” or a “therapist.” The enormous online reaction shows that, when language models sound convincingly human, people start to forget they aren't.
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 21/08/2025
Big thank you to @frankpasquale.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy for his generous review of The Privacy Fallacy in the Journal of Law & Political Economy. He lays out the difficult questions involved in valuing harm & distributing compensation, in which LPE can play a role escholarship.org/uc/item/4jz9...
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Alicia Solow-Niederman @aliciasn.bsky.social · 17/08/2025
I'm delighted to share that my article, AI and Doctrinal Collapse, is forthcoming in Stanford Law Review! Draft at papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.....
Article abstract
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Tiffany C. Li @tiffanycli.bsky.social · 19/07/2025
I often think of this intentional stylistic choice as the opposite of Madeleine Elish’s “moral crumple zone” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
Moral Crumple Zones: Cautionary Tales in Human-Robot Interaction (pre-print)
As debates about the policy and ethical implications of AI systems grow, it will be increasingly important to accurately locate who is responsible when agency i
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 18/07/2025
D’Souza highlights something key: AI makes new inferences that amplify harms we can’t meaningfully consent to or control. So “navigating the artificially intelligent world of the near future”, as he puts it, is a call for new forms of accountability digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca/cjlt/vol22/i...
digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca
<i>The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy</i> by Ignacio Cofone
‘‘Our privacy is besieged by tech companies,”1 laments Ignacio Cofone, Law Professor and privacy aficionado, in The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy. In an enlightening yet h...
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 18/07/2025
Grateful to Christopher D’Souza for his thoughtful review of The Privacy Fallacy in the Canadian Journal of Law & Technology. He that our privacy regime is, as he says,“not only outdated, but untenable” in the face of current data practices.
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 17/07/2025
CDS highlights something crucial: AI makes new types of inferences that amplify harms we can’t meaningfully consent to or control. “Navigating the artificially intelligent world of the near future”, as he puts it, is a call for data accountability digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca/cjlt/vol22/i...
digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca
<i>The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy</i> by Ignacio Cofone
‘‘Our privacy is besieged by tech companies,”1 laments Ignacio Cofone, Law Professor and privacy aficionado, in The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy. In an enlightening yet h...
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The Information Society Project at Yale Law School @yaleisp.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
Check out recorded talks from our Law & Tech Speaker Series: lnkd.in/eBZ2prw7 In “Why AI Requires Rebuilding Privacy Law”, Prof. @ignaciocofone.bsky.social explains why AI demands shifting privacy law from individual control to harm prevention. 👉 www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsQV...
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Tiffany C. Li @tiffanycli.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
New draft from me, “Privacy and Disinformation,” on why privacy law, not speech or economic regulation, is the best path forward for fighting social media disinformation. Read the draft here (and later finalized in UC Law Journal): papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Table of contents
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Andrew Guthrie Ferguson @profferguson.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
What an amazing resource by @daniel-solove.bsky.social. A history of privacy books. Makes a perfect summer reading list. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
<span>Notable Privacy Books: A Journey Through History</span>
<p><span>In this essay, I discuss notable privacy books from the 1960s to 2020s – seven decades and more than 400 books. I briefly explain why each book is note
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Ignacio Cofone @ignaciocofone.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
Helpful article for this, @thomaskadri.bsky.social's Platforms as Blackacres www.uclalawreview.org/platforms-as...
uclalawreview.org
Platforms as Blackacres - UCLA Law Review
ABSTRACT This Article argues that this indiscriminate treatment of all websites as blackacres violates the First Amendment. Applying cyber-trespass rules identically across the internet undermines cor...
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TeachPrivacy @teachprivacy.bsky.social · 02/06/2025
In this essay, @daniel-solove.bsky.social discusses 400+ privacy books over the past 70+ years papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
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Margot @margotkaminski.bsky.social · 21/05/2025
The EU AI Act establishes a different right to explanation of an AI system's decisions than the GDPR: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... (by Kaminski & Malgieri)
papers.ssrn.com
The Right to Explanation in the AI Act
This chapter offers a comprehensive analysis of Article 86 of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, which introduces a right to explanation for individuals affect
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Kristen Thomasen @kristenthomasen.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
ICYMI: We Robot 2025 has a new permanent online home @windsorlaw.bsky.social, along with 2 exciting updates: 🤖 Video links are now included for each of our panels. Revisit or check out the conversation if you couldn't join us in person. 🤖 And (see next post) 1/3 www.uwindsor.ca/law/3450/wer...
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