'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy [pdf]

Strongly recommended by the libertarian law professor Glenn Reynolds, best known as the Instapundit link blogger, http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/170554/: "It’s the #1 paper on SSRN for all-time downloads, and with good reason."

I just clicked the OP link, then clicked "Download this paper" and I had it. I have no account and have never visited SSRN before...

EDIT: On clicking "download" a second time, I do get a login page -- but it still has a "download anonymously" option, says you just won't count towards the paper's stats.

Yeah, good spot. An Incognito or Private window will also work.

Part of the "good reason" that it is the number one downloaded paper is "the rich get richer" phenomena[1][2] and that it is a paper that is related to online/internet legal scholarship. It is certainly a great paper but most downloaded paper is not a sign that it is the pinnacle of legal scholarship. A recent article about the most cited legal papers of all time had this to say:

  "With the proliferation of services available for faculty to share their
  scholarship online, “download” or “view” counts have also become a domi-
  nant marker of “impact,” particular ly download counts from subject
  and institutional repositories. (Some full-text research databases and
  other com- mercial services have begun to refl ect usage statistics in
  their products.  This type of metric differs significantly from citation
  metrics: it is really a measurement of the “popularity” or visi bility
  of the article, noting whether an abstract was viewed or visited and
  whether a link was clicked rather than whether the paper was actually
  read, thought well of, and used. 
  ...
  The top downloaded paper of all time on SSRN as of the writing of this
  Article appears on none of Shapiro’s lists.  81 Furthermore, only one
  paper on Shapiro’s all-time top 100 list in Table I or recent-articles
  list in Table II appears in SSRN’s top 100 downloaded papers ( Property,
  Intellectual Property, and Free Riding by Mark A. Lemley). Of the top
  100 downloaded law authors in SSRN, only 15 are on any of Shapiro’s
  lists. Looking at the au- thors listed in the recent-articles lis t in
  Table II, the author’s most downloaded paper of all time appears in this
  list only approximately half the time. It is clear that while arguably a
  metric in and of itself, being a top downloaded paper in SSRN does not
  equate with being a top-cited paper of all time. One could argue that an
  artic le’s presence in newer cited-reference services might potentially
  provide a new metric, but as with other metrics, it is subject to the
  volatility of the source content."[3]

[1] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/netwo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network

[3] http://www.michiganlawreview.org/assets/pdfs/110/8/Shapiro_a...

"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu