Profile of Jay Edelson, who specializes in privacy class-action lawsuits against tech firms, relying on the application of old laws to new technologies
Conor Dougherty / New York Times : Tweets: @jessicalessin Tweets: Jessica Lessin / @jessicalessin : Great @nyt piece by @ConorDougherty on Jay Adelson, whom techies regard as a “leech tarted up as a freedom fighter.” http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2015 profile lands at the start of a decade-long arc the related coverage traces: with no federal regulator setting data-privacy rules, accountability work gets done by individuals — lawyers like Jay Edelson repurposing old statutes into class actions, activists who later drove California's privacy bill, and consumers like David Carroll, whose two-year fight to reclaim his data from Cambridge Analytica turned one person's request into a public test case.
The tech community's reaction captured in Jessica Lessin's tweet — Edelson as a 'leech tarted up as a freedom fighter' — previews the adversarial frame that persists across the coverage, most explicitly in lobbyist Andrew Kingman's career helping large companies that want lax rules on data privacy.
First-order effects
- Tech firms named in Edelson's class actions face direct legal exposure from old laws applied to new technologies, with settlement costs and disclosure practices on the line.
- Edelson himself gains a public profile that cuts both ways: visibility for his docket, and a lasting reputation inside the industry as parasitic rather than principled.
Second-order effects
- Companies facing private litigation have a strong incentive to fund the lobbying track — the Kingman-style effort to keep formal regulation lax — because weak statutes are what make courtroom repurposing of old laws the main threat.
- Privacy advocates respond in kind by pursuing legislation, as the California bill shows, aiming to replace judge-by-judge statutory improvisation with actual rules.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US data-privacy enforcement structurally consolidates around private actors — class-action lawyers, individual plaintiffs, activist campaigns — acting as de facto regulators where Congress and federal agencies provide none.
The trend: US data-privacy accountability is being built by private litigants and individual plaintiffs filling the vacuum left by the absence of federal regulation.