Law Commons^™

Push, Pull, And Spill: A Transdisciplinary Case Study In Municipal Open Government, Jan Whittington, Ryan Calo, Mike Simon, Jesse Woo, Meg Young, Perter Schmiedeskamp

Articles

Municipal open data raises hopes and concerns. The activities of cities produce a wide array of data, data that is vastly enriched by ubiquitous computing. Municipal data is opened as it is pushed to, pulled by, and spilled to the public through online portals, requests for public records, and releases by cities and their vendors, contractors, and partners. By opening data, cities hope to raise public trust and prompt innovation. Municipal data, however, is often about the people who live, work, and travel in the city. By opening data, cities raise concern for privacy and social justice.

This article presents …

Self-Defense Against Robots And Drones, A. Michael Froomkin, P. Zak Colangelo

Articles

Robots can pose-or can appear to pose-a threat to life, property, and privacy. May a landowner legally shoot down a trespassing drone? Can she hold a trespassing autonomous car as security against damage done or further torts? Is the fear that a drone may be operated by a paparazzo or Peeping Tom sufficient grounds to disable or interfere with it? How hard may you shove if the office robot rolls over your foot? This Article addresses all those issues and one more. what rules and standards we could put into place to make the resolution of those questions easier and …

Regulating Mass Surveillance As Privacy Pollution: Learning From Environmental Impact Statements, A. Michael Froomkin

Articles

Encroachments on privacy through mass surveillance greatly resemble the pollution crisis in that they can be understood as imposing an externality on the surveilled. This Article argues that this resemblance also suggests a solution: requiring those conducting mass surveillance in and through public spaces to disclose their plans publicly via an updated form of environmental impact statement, thus requiring an impact analysis and triggering a more informed public conversation about privacy. The Article first explains how mass surveillance is polluting public privacy and surveys the limited and inadequate doctrinal tools available to respond to mass surveillance technologies. Then, it provides …

From Anonymity To Identification, A. Michael Froomkin

Articles

This article examines whether anonymity online has a future. In the early days of the Internet, strong cryptography, anonymous remailers, and a relative lack of surveillance created an environment conducive to anonymous communication. Today, the outlook for online anonymity is poor. Several forces combine against it: ideologies that hold that anonymity is dangerous, or that identifying evil-doers is more important than ensuring a safe mechanism for unpopular speech; the profitability of identification in commerce; government surveillance; the influence of intellectual property interests and in requiring hardware and other tools that enforce identification; and the law at both national and supranational …

Reasonable Expectations Of Privacy Settings: Social Media And The Stored Communications Act, David Thaw, Christopher Borchert, Fernando Pinguelo

Articles

In 1986, Congress passed the Stored Communications Act (“SCA”) to provide additional protections for individuals’ private communications content held in electronic storage by third parties. Acting out of direct concern for the implications of the Third-Party Records Doctrine — a judicially created doctrine that generally eliminates Fourth Amendment protections for information entrusted to third parties — Congress sought to tailor the SCA to electronic communications sent via and stored by third parties. Yet, because Congress crafted the SCA with language specific to the technology of 1986, courts today have struggled to apply the SCA consistently with regard to similar private …