Unlike privacy law discourse, which has primarily explored questions related to others’ knowledge, access, and use of information about us, commercial law’s central focus has been on issues related to trade involving persons, merchants, and entities. In the commercial law context, questions about knowledge and information are primarily connected to the exchange and disclosure of information needed to facilitate transactions between parties.1 This distinct historical focus has likely contributed to commercial law’s failure to adequately account for and address privacy, security, and digital domination harms. In some cases, commercial law also defers to corporate commercial practices as well.

As we have seen, the law wields considerable influence over the rights and remedies available to us as consumers. Several areas of commercial law are ill-equipped to sufficiently protect our consumer interests in the IoT age. This is because various legal frameworks governing commercial practices have not been sufficiently reformulated to account for the growing connections between the world of privacy and the world of commercial law. As earlier sections of this book have demonstrated, there are multiple legal frameworks impacting commercial practices at the federal and state level that are ripe for significant legal reform. These sources of law include contract law, the FAA, products liability law, the CDA, debt collection law, the Bankruptcy Code, and secured financing laws.