Competing Inferences From Consumer Behavior: Evaluating Empirical Evidence in Privacy Disputes

Consumer behavior evidence plays an increasingly important role in privacy litigation and regulatory proceedings, where courts and agencies are often asked to draw conclusions from consumers’ interactions with digital products, disclosures, and privacy-related practices. Yet the same observed conduct may be consistent with multiple explanations, making it difficult to infer how consumers made decisions, what they valued, what they understood, or whether a challenged practice affected their beh