Law Commons^™

Fighting Cyber-Crime After United States V. Jones, Danielle K. Citron, David Gray, Liz Rinehart

Faculty Scholarship

In a landmark non-decision last term, five Justices of the United States Supreme Court would have held that citizens possess a Fourth Amendment right to expect that certain quantities of information about them will remain private, even if they have no such expectations with respect to any of the information or data constituting that whole. This quantitative approach to evaluating and protecting Fourth Amendment rights is certainly novel and raises serious conceptual, doctrinal, and practical challenges. In other works, we have met these challenges by engaging in a careful analysis of this “mosaic theory” and by proposing that courts focus …

The Fight To Frame Privacy, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

The resolution of a debate often hinges on how the problem being debated is presented. In psychology and related disciplines, this method of issue presentation is known as framing. Framing theory holds that even small changes in the presentation of an issue or event can produce significant changes of opinion. Framing has become increasingly important in discussions about privacy and security. In his new book, "Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security," Daniel Solove argues that if we continue to view privacy and security as diametrically opposed to each other, privacy will always lose. Solove argues that …

Social Data, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

As online social media grow, it is increasingly important to distinguish between the different threats to privacy that arise from the conversion of our social interactions into data. One well-recognized threat is from the robust concentrations of electronic information aggregated into colossal databases. Yet much of this same information is also consumed socially and dispersed through a user interface to hundreds, if not thousands, of peer users.

In order to distinguish relationally shared information from the threat of the electronic database, this essay identifies the massive amounts of personal information shared via the user interface of social technologies as “social …

The Case For Online Obscurity, Woodrow Hartzog, Frederic Stutzman

Faculty Scholarship

On the Internet, obscure information has a minimal risk of being discovered or understood by unintended recipients. Empirical research demonstrates that Internet users rely on obscurity perhaps more than anything else to protect their privacy. Yet, online obscurity has been largely ignored by courts and lawmakers. In this Article, we argue that obscurity is a critical component of online privacy, but it has not been embraced by courts and lawmakers because it has never been adequately defined or conceptualized. This lack of definition has resulted in the concept of online obscurity being too insubstantial to serve as a helpful guide …

Obscurity By Design, Woodrow Hartzog, Frederic D. Stutzman

Faculty Scholarship

Design-based solutions to confront technological privacy threats are becoming popular with regulators. However, these promising solutions have left the full potential of design untapped. With respect to online communication technologies, design-based solutions for privacy remain incomplete because they have yet to successfully address the trickiest aspect of the Internet — social interaction. This Article posits that privacy-protection strategies such as “Privacy by Design” face unique challenges with regard to social software and social technology due to their interactional nature.

This Article proposes that design-based solutions for social technologies benefit from increased attention to user interaction, with a focus on the …

Big Data In Small Hands, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger

Faculty Scholarship

"Big data" can be defined as a problem-solving philosophy that leverages massive data-sets and algorithmic analysis to extract "hidden information and surprising correlations." Not only does big data pose a threat to traditional notions of privacy, but it also compromises socially shared information. This point remains under appreciated because our so-called public disclosures are not nearly as public as courts and policymakers have argued — at least, not yet. That is subject to change once big data becomes user friendly.

Most social disclosures and details of our everyday lives are meant to be known only to a select group of …