Consumer Protection Law Commons^™

A Recent Renaissance In Privacy Law, Margot Kaminski

Publications

Considering the recent increased attention to privacy law issues amid the typically slow pace of legal change.

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 …

High Technology, Consumer Privacy, And U.S. National Security, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Documents released over the past year detailing the National Security Agency’s (“NSA”) telephony metadata collection program and interception of international content under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) implicated U.S. high technology companies in government surveillance. The result was an immediate, and detrimental, impact on U.S. corporations, the economy, and U.S. national security.

The first Snowden documents, printed on June 5, 2013, revealed that the government had served orders on Verizon, directing the company to turn over telephony metadata under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. The following day, The Guardian published classified slides detailing how the NSA had …

Robots In The Home: What Will We Have Agreed To?, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

A new technology can expose the cracks in legal doctrine. Sometimes a technology resists analogy. Sometimes, through analogies, it reveals inconsistencies in the law, or basic flaws in framing, or in the fit between different parts of the legal system. This Essay addresses robots in the home, and what they reveal about U.S. privacy law. Household robots might not themselves uproot U.S. privacy law, but they will reveal its inconsistencies, and show where it is most likely to fracture. Just as drones are serving as a legislative “privacy catalyst” — encouraging the enactment of new privacy laws as people realize …

The Fourth Amendment At The Airport: Arriving, Departing Or Cancelled?, Joel Gora

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.