Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Privacy Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 21 of 21

Full-Text Articles in Privacy Law

The Automated Fourth Amendment, Maneka Sinha Jan 2024

The Automated Fourth Amendment, Maneka Sinha

Faculty Scholarship

Courts routinely defer to police officer judgments in reasonable suspicion and probable cause determinations. Increasingly, though, police officers outsource these threshold judgments to new forms of technology that purport to predict and detect crime and identify those responsible. These policing technologies automate core police determinations about whether crime is occurring and who is responsible. Criminal procedure doctrine has failed to insist on some level of scrutiny of—or skepticism about—the reliability of this technology. Through an original study analyzing numerous state and federal court opinions, this Article exposes the implications of law enforcement’s reliance on these practices given the weighty interests …


Black Lives Monitored, Chaz Arnett Jan 2023

Black Lives Monitored, Chaz Arnett

Faculty Scholarship

The police killing of George Floyd added fuel to the simmering flames of racial injustice in America following a string of similarly violent executions during a global pandemic that disproportionately ravaged the health and economic security of Black families and communities. The confluence of these painful realities exposed deep vulnerabilities and renewed a reckoning with the long unfulfilled promise of racial equality, inspiring large-scale protests around the country and across the globe. As with prior movements for racial justice, from slavery abolition to the civil rights movement’s demand to end Jim Crow, protests have been met with extreme force, either …


Submission To The Province Of Nova Scotia On Its Review Of The Intimate Images And Cyber-Protection Act - Leaf, Suzie Dunn, Rosel Kim Jan 2022

Submission To The Province Of Nova Scotia On Its Review Of The Intimate Images And Cyber-Protection Act - Leaf, Suzie Dunn, Rosel Kim

Reports & Public Policy Documents

The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) commends the Nova Scotia government for reviewing its Intimate Images and Cyber-protection Act (the Act) and seeking public input for this review. Nova Scotia has been, and continues to be, a leader in Canada for its role in advancing innovative laws and supports for people targeted by technology-facilitated violence (TFV), digital abuse, and the non-consensual distribution of intimate images (NCDII). As these forms of harmful behaviour evolve and become better understood, it is important to revisit this legislation to assess whether it is providing meaningful and accessible responses to such serious social …


Periods For Profit And The Rise Of Menstrual Surveillance, Michele E. Gilman Apr 2021

Periods For Profit And The Rise Of Menstrual Surveillance, Michele E. Gilman

All Faculty Scholarship

Menstruation is being monetized and surveilled, with the voluntary participation of millions of women. Thousands of downloadable apps promise to help women monitor their periods and manage their fertility. These apps are part of the broader, multi-billion dollar, Femtech industry, which sells technology to help women understand and improve their health. Femtech is marketed with the language of female autonomy and feminist empowerment. Despite this rhetoric, Femtech is part of a broader business strategy of data extraction, in which companies are extracting people’s personal data for profit, typically without their knowledge or meaningful consent. Femtech can oppress menstruators in several …


Pandemic Surveillance Discrimination, Christian Sundquist Jan 2021

Pandemic Surveillance Discrimination, Christian Sundquist

Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the abiding tension between surveillance and privacy. Public health epidemiology has long utilized a variety of surveillance methods—such as contact tracing, quarantines, and mandatory reporting laws—to control the spread of disease during past epidemics and pandemics. Officials have typically justified the resulting intrusions on privacy as necessary for the greater public good by helping to stave off larger health crisis. The nature and scope of public health surveillance in the battle against COVID-19, however, has significantly changed with the advent of new technologies. Digital surveillance tools, often embedded in wearable technology, have greatly increased …


Artificial Intelligence And The Challenges Of Workplace Discrimination And Privacy, Pauline Kim, Matthew T. Bodie Jan 2021

Artificial Intelligence And The Challenges Of Workplace Discrimination And Privacy, Pauline Kim, Matthew T. Bodie

Scholarship@WashULaw

Employers are increasingly relying on artificially intelligent (AI) systems to recruit, select, and manage their workforces, raising fears that these systems may subject workers to discriminatory, invasive, or otherwise unfair treatment. This article reviews those concerns and provides an overview of how current laws may apply, focusing on two particular problems: discrimination on the basis of protected characteristics like race, sex, or disability, and the invasion of workers’ privacy engendered by workplace AI systems. It discusses the ways in which relying on AI to make personnel decisions can produce discriminatory outcomes and how current law might apply. It then explores …


Submission To The Toronto Police Services Board’S Use Of New Artificial Intelligence Technologies Policy- Leaf And The Citizen Lab, Suzie Dunn, Kristen Mj Thomasen, Kate Robertson, Pam Hrick, Cynthia Khoo, Rosel Kim, Ngozi Okidegbe, Christopher Parsons Jan 2021

Submission To The Toronto Police Services Board’S Use Of New Artificial Intelligence Technologies Policy- Leaf And The Citizen Lab, Suzie Dunn, Kristen Mj Thomasen, Kate Robertson, Pam Hrick, Cynthia Khoo, Rosel Kim, Ngozi Okidegbe, Christopher Parsons

Reports & Public Policy Documents

We write as a group of experts in the legal regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), technology-facilitated violence, equality, and the use of AI systems by law enforcement in Canada. We have experience working within academia and legal practice, and are affiliated with LEAF and the Citizen Lab who support this letter.

We reviewed the Toronto Police Services Board Use of New Artificial Intelligence Technologies Policy and provide comments and recommendations focused on the following key observations:

1. Police use of AI technologies must not be seen as inevitable
2. A commitment to protecting equality and human rights must be integrated …


Data Mining And The Challenges Of Protecting Employee Privacy Under U.S. Law, Pauline Kim Jan 2019

Data Mining And The Challenges Of Protecting Employee Privacy Under U.S. Law, Pauline Kim

Scholarship@WashULaw

Concerns about employee privacy have intensified with the introduction of data mining tools in the workplace. Employers can now readily access detailed data about workers’ online behavior or social media activities, purchase background information from data brokers, and collect additional data from workplace surveillance tools. When data mining techniques are applied to this wealth of data, it is possible to infer additional information about employees beyond the information that is collected directly. As a consequence, these tools can alter the meaning and significance of personal information depending upon what other information it is aggregated with and how the larger dataset …


Ancient Worries And Modern Fears: Different Roots And Common Effects Of U.S. And Eu Privacy Regulation, David Thaw, Pierluigi Perri Jan 2017

Ancient Worries And Modern Fears: Different Roots And Common Effects Of U.S. And Eu Privacy Regulation, David Thaw, Pierluigi Perri

Articles

Much legal and technical scholarship discusses the differing views of the United States and European Union toward privacy concepts and regulation. A substantial amount of effort in recent years, in both research and policy, focuses on attempting to reconcile these viewpoints searching for a common framework with a common level of protection for citizens from both sides of Atlantic. Reconciliation, we argue, misunderstands the nature of the challenge facing effective cross-border data flows. No such reconciliation can occur without abdication of some sovereign authority of nations, that would require the adoption of an international agreement with typical tools of international …


Health Information Equity, Craig Konnoth Jan 2017

Health Information Equity, Craig Konnoth

Publications

In the last few years, numerous Americans’ health information has been collected and used for follow-on, secondary research. This research studies correlations between medical conditions, genetic or behavioral profiles, and treatments, to customize medical care to specific individuals. Recent federal legislation and regulations make it easier to collect and use the data of the low-income, unwell, and elderly for this purpose. This would impose disproportionate security and autonomy burdens on these individuals. Those who are well-off and pay out of pocket could effectively exempt their data from the publicly available information pot. This presents a problem which modern research ethics …


Can The Government Deport Immigrants Using Information It Encouraged Them To Provide?, Amanda Frost Jan 2017

Can The Government Deport Immigrants Using Information It Encouraged Them To Provide?, Amanda Frost

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Essay describes the legal and policy issues raised by any systematic effort to deport unauthorized immigrants based on information the government invited them to provide. Part I briefly surveys some of the major laws, regulations, and programs that encourage unauthorized immigrants to identify themselves. Part II analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the statutory and constitutional arguments that immigrants could raise as a defense against deportations based on self-reported data. Part III explains that even if the government’s systematic use of such data to deport unauthorized immigrants is legal, doing so would be a poor policy choice for any …


13th Annual Diversity Symposium Dinner 04-07-2016, Roger Williams University School Of Law Apr 2016

13th Annual Diversity Symposium Dinner 04-07-2016, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.


Use Of Facial Recognition Technology For Medical Purposes: Balancing Privacy With Innovation, Seema Mohapatra Jan 2016

Use Of Facial Recognition Technology For Medical Purposes: Balancing Privacy With Innovation, Seema Mohapatra

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Regulating The Internet Of Things: First Steps Toward Managing Discrimination, Privacy, Security, And Consent, Scott R. Peppet Jan 2014

Regulating The Internet Of Things: First Steps Toward Managing Discrimination, Privacy, Security, And Consent, Scott R. Peppet

Publications

The consumer "Internet of Things" is suddenly reality, not science fiction. Electronic sensors are now ubiquitous in our smartphones, cars, homes, electric systems, health-care devices, fitness monitors, and workplaces. These connected, sensor-based devices create new types and unprecedented quantities of detailed, high-quality information about our everyday actions, habits, personalities, and preferences. Much of this undoubtedly increases social welfare. For example, insurers can price automobile coverage more accurately by using sensors to measure exactly how you drive (e.g., Progressive 's Snapshot system), which should theoretically lower the overall cost of insurance. But the Internet of Things raises new and difficult questions …


A Private Underworld: The Naked Body In Law And Society, Lawrence M. Friedman, Joanna L. Grossman Jan 2013

A Private Underworld: The Naked Body In Law And Society, Lawrence M. Friedman, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In general, the literature on privacy stresses, quite naturally, our right to keep things private, or to make our own decisions. The individual, the citizen, is the center of gravity. There is a great deal of material on the limits of privacy, on threats to privacy, and the like. In this Article, the authors want to discuss what one might call mandatory privacy: those aspects of life that we are required to keep secret, hidden, or private, the things that we must keep private, whether we want to or not. This is a subject that has been mostly, though not …


Electronic Privacy And Employee Speech, Pauline Kim Jan 2012

Electronic Privacy And Employee Speech, Pauline Kim

Scholarship@WashULaw

The boundary between work and private life is blurring as a result of changes in the organization of work and advances in technology. Current privacy law is ill-equipped to address these changes and as a result, employees’ privacy in their electronic communications is only weakly protected from employer scrutiny. At the same time, the law increasingly protects certain socially valued forms of employee speech. In particular, collective speech, speech that enforces workplace regulations and speech that deters or reports employer wrong-doing are explicitly protected by law from employer reprisals. These two developments — weak protection of employee privacy and increased …


Collateral Consequences, Genetic Surveillance, And The New Biopolitics Of Race, Dorothy E. Roberts Apr 2011

Collateral Consequences, Genetic Surveillance, And The New Biopolitics Of Race, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article is part of a Howard Law Journal Symposium on “Collateral Consequences: Who Really Pays the Price for Criminal Justice?,” as well as my larger book project, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011). It considers state and federal government expansion of genetic surveillance as a collateral consequence of a criminal record in the context of a new biopolitics of race in America. Part I reviews the expansion of DNA data banking by states and the federal government, extending the collateral impact of a criminal record—in the form …


Associational Privacy And The First Amendment: Naacp V. Alabama, Privacy And Data Protection, Anita L. Allen Jan 2011

Associational Privacy And The First Amendment: Naacp V. Alabama, Privacy And Data Protection, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Mapping Online Privacy, Jacqueline D. Lipton Jan 2010

Mapping Online Privacy, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

Privacy scholars have recently outlined difficulties in applying existing concepts of personal privacy to the maturing Internet. With Web 2.0 technologies, more people have more opportunities to post information about themselves and others online, often with scant regard for individual privacy. Shifting notions of 'reasonable expectations of privacy' in the context of blogs, wikis, and online social networks create challenges for privacy regulation. Courts and commentators struggle with Web 2.0 privacy incursions without the benefit of a clear regulatory framework. This article offers a map of privacy that might help delineate at least the outer boundaries of Web 2.0 privacy. …


Regulating The Use Of Genetic Information: Perspective From The U.S. Experience, Pauline Kim Jan 2010

Regulating The Use Of Genetic Information: Perspective From The U.S. Experience, Pauline Kim

Scholarship@WashULaw

This essay comments on an empirical study documenting the policies, practices, and attitudes of Australian employers regarding the use of genetic information from the U.S. perspective. The U.S. Congress recently enacted the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA), which, among other things, prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of genetic information and restricts employers’ access to their employees’ genetic information. Just as the Australian study found no evidence of systematic use of genetic testing or screening by employers, GINA was passed in the absence of any evidence of widespread employment discrimination on the basis of genetic characteristics. Although it …


Controlling Identity: Plessy, Privacy, And Racial Defamation, Jonathan Kahn Jan 2005

Controlling Identity: Plessy, Privacy, And Racial Defamation, Jonathan Kahn

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the origins of privacy law in early twentieth century America in relation to the legal solidification of Jim Crow in the aftermath of Plessy v. Ferguson. It considers some distinctively southern aspects of the origins of the right to privacy and argues that by viewing privacy, racial defamation, and Jim Crow in relation to each other, we can gain new insights into each-coming to understand that Plessy was not just about controlling space, or property, or even equality but also about controlling identity itself, and coming to see that in its origins, the right to privacy had …