Law Commons^™

Twittering Away The Right Of Publicity: Personality Rights And Celebrity Impersonation On Social Networking Websites, Andrew M. Jung

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Within the past couple of years, social networking websites have become an immensely popular destination for people from all walks of life. Websites like Facebook and Twitter now count tens of millions of worldwide users, including world leaders and a number of celebrities. Eventually, users realized that social networking websites lent themselves to the quick and easy impersonation of celebrities through the creation of fake social networking accounts, often as a form of parody. One subject of such impersonation was professional baseball manager Tony La Russa, who took the then-unprecedented step of suing his impersonators and Twitter over the incident. …

Fulfilling Government 2.0'S Promise With Robust Privacy Protections, Danielle Keats Citron

Danielle Keats Citron

The public can now “friend” the White House and scores of agencies on social networks, virtual worlds, and video-sharing sites. The Obama Administration sees this trend as crucial to enhancing governmental transparency, public participation, and collaboration. As the President has underscored, government needs to tap into the public’s expertise because it doesn’t have all of the answers. To be sure, Government 2.0 might improve civic engagement. But it also might produce privacy vulnerabilities because agencies often gain access to individuals’ social network profiles, photographs, videos, and contact lists when interacting with individuals online. Little would prevent agencies from using and …

Fulfilling Government 2.0'S Promise With Robust Privacy Protections, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

The public can now “friend” the White House and scores of agencies on social networks, virtual worlds, and video-sharing sites. The Obama Administration sees this trend as crucial to enhancing governmental transparency, public participation, and collaboration. As the President has underscored, government needs to tap into the public’s expertise because it doesn’t have all of the answers.

To be sure, Government 2.0 might improve civic engagement. But it also might produce privacy vulnerabilities because agencies often gain access to individuals’ social network profiles, photographs, videos, and contact lists when interacting with individuals online. Little would prevent agencies from using and …

Sovereignty In The Age Of Twitter, Donald L. Doernberg

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

To a degree unimaginable even as recently as twenty-five years ago, people all over the world can communicate with each other easily, cheaply, and frequently, with the concomitant result that people learn more about what is happening elsewhere in the world and even in their own countries. Governments can no longer control information flow nearly to the extent that was once possible, and that has enabled people outside of government to know much more about what government is doing and to know it considerably sooner than might otherwise have been the case. That availability of information is changing the nature …

Context Is Everything: Sociality And Privacy In Online Social Network Sites, Ronald Leenes

Ronald Leenes

Social Network Sites (SNSs) pose many privacy issues. Apart from the fact that privacy in an online social network site may sound like an oxymo- ron, significant privacy issues are caused by the way social structures are currently handled in SNSs. Conceptually different social groups are generally conflated into the singular notion of ‘friend’. This chapter argues that attention should be paid to the social dynamics of SNSs and the way people handle social contexts. It shows that SNS technology can be designed to support audience segregation, which should mitigate at least some of the privacy issues in Social Network …

Fulfilling Government 2.0'S Promise With Robust Privacy Protections, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

The public can now “friend” the White House and scores of agencies on social networks, virtual worlds, and video-sharing sites. The Obama Administration sees this trend as crucial to enhancing governmental transparency, public participation, and collaboration. As the President has underscored, government needs to tap into the public’s expertise because it doesn’t have all of the answers. To be sure, Government 2.0 might improve civic engagement. But it also might produce privacy vulnerabilities because agencies often gain access to individuals’ social network profiles, photographs, videos, and contact lists when interacting with individuals online. Little would prevent agencies from using and …

Legal Implications Of The Use Of Social Media: Minimizing The Legal Risks For Employers And Employees, Damian R. Laplaca, Noah Winkeller

Proxy

No abstract provided.

Cyberspace Property Rights: Private Property Interests In The Context Of Internet Webpages, Taylor E. White

Proxy

No abstract provided.

Privacy As Product Safety, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Online social media confound many of our familiar expectations about privacy. Contrary to popular myth, users of social software like Facebook do care about privacy, deserve it, and have trouble securing it for themselves. Moreover, traditional database-focused privacy regulations on the Fair Information Practices model, while often worthwhile, fail to engage with the distinctively social aspects of these online services.

Instead, online privacy law should take inspiration from a perhaps surprising quarter: product-safety law. A web site that directs users' personal information in ways they don't expect is a defectively designed product, and many concepts from products liability law could …

Government Speech 2.0, Danielle K. Citron, Helen Norton

Faculty Scholarship

New expressive technologies continue to transform the ways in which members of the public speak to one another. Not surprisingly, emerging technologies have changed the ways in which government speaks as well. Despite substantial shifts in how the government and other parties actually communicate, however, the Supreme Court to date has developed its government speech doctrine – which recognizes “government speech” as a defense to First Amendment challenges by plaintiffs who claim that the government has impermissibly excluded their expression based on viewpoint – only in the context of disputes involving fairly traditional forms of expression. In none of these …