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Full-Text Articles in Law
Platforms As Blackacres, Thomas E. Kadri
Platforms As Blackacres, Thomas E. Kadri
Scholarly Works
While writing this Article, I interviewed a journalist who writes stories about harmful technologies. To do this work, he gathers information from websites to reveal trends that online platforms would prefer to hide. His team has exposed how Facebook threatens people’s privacy and safety, how Amazon hides cheaper deals from consumers, and how Google diverts political speech from our inboxes. You’d think the journalist might want credit for telling these important stories, but he instead insisted on anonymity when we talked because his lawyer was worried he’d be confessing to breaking the law—to committing the crime and tort of cyber-trespass. …
Digital Gatekeepers, Thomas E. Kadri
Digital Gatekeepers, Thomas E. Kadri
Scholarly Works
If in William Blackstone's time we might have thought of a person's home as their castle, in Mark Zuckerberg's time we might say that their website is too. Under cyber-trespass laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, courts have treated online platforms as digital gatekeepers--as property owners that may permit and restrict access to websites much like landowners may do with private land in the real world. If platforms withhold their consent through words or inference, cyber-trespass laws let them enforce their preferences about who may access their services and gather information from the internet. Concerned about reputations and …