RECENT HAPPENINGS

Professor Woodrow Hartzog’s paper the Great Scrape, co-written with Daniel Solove, was a 2025 Privacy Papers for Policymakers (PPPM) award recipient. The PPPM Awards recognize leading U.S. and international privacy scholarship that is relevant to policymakers in the U.S. Congress, federal agencies, and international data protection authorities.

To further its law reform work, the Institute elects individuals who reflect the excellence and diversity of today's legal profession. Professor Hartzog was elected in light of his internationally recognized work in privacy and technology law, as well as his influence in the debate over privacy and surveillance rules. 

Professor Woodrow Hartzog was listed in the Top 100 Legal Scholar in 2024. Based on the number of citations to Professor Hartzog’s work and publication frequency, he was ranked #48 among all American legal scholars. 

Professor Woodrow Hartzog was listed as the 4th most cited legal scholar in the law and technology field between 2019 and 2023.

Boston University School of Law welcomes Woodrow Hartzog as a full-time professor of law. Previously, Hartzog was a visiting professor at BU Law in 2020. He will be teaching Information Privacy Law this fall.

Woodrow Hartzog, a professor with joint appointments in the Northeastern University School of Law and the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, received the Excellence in Research and Creativity faculty award. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University

Professor Woodrow Hartzog, an internationally recognized expert in the area of privacy, media and robotics law, has been appointed to a special legislative Commission on Government Use of Facial Recognition Technology.

Based on the latest Sisk data, Professor Hartzog is among the ten most-cited law faculty in law & technology (including Internet law [cyberlaw], informational privacy, cybersecurity, and AI/robotics) in the U.S. for the period 2016-2020

“The idea is we don’t just want to be a tempest in a teapot of privacy research where we make a lot of noise, but nothing changes,” Choffnes said. “By having integrated onto our team folks like Woody Hartzog—and counterparts at other universities—we can turn our findings and observations into recommendations for new laws that would take our recommendations and put them into practice.”

Facial recognition technology can be wildly inaccurate and prone to replicating the racial or gender-based biases of the engineers who created it, says Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern. 

Offered by Northeastern University through Coursera, this course is designed to introduce data privacy to a wide audience and help each participant see how data privacy has evolved as a compelling concern to public and private organizations as well as individuals.

The popular book on Privacy and Design is now available in Korean.