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Full-Text Articles in Privacy Law

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

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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 …


Neuroprediction: New Technology, Old Problems, Stephen J. Morse Jan 2015

Neuroprediction: New Technology, Old Problems, Stephen J. Morse

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Neuroprediction is the use of structural or functional brain or nervous system variables to make any type of prediction, including medical prognoses and behavioral forecasts, such as an indicator of future dangerous behavior. This commentary will focus on behavioral predictions, but the analysis applies to any context. The general thesis is that using neurovariables for prediction is a new technology, but that it raises no new ethical issues, at least for now. Only if neuroscience achieves the ability to “read” mental content will genuinely new ethical issues be raised, but that is not possible at present.


Health Insurance, Employment, And The Human Genome: Genetic Discrimination And Biobanks In The United States, Eric A. Feldman, Chelsea Darnell Jan 2013

Health Insurance, Employment, And The Human Genome: Genetic Discrimination And Biobanks In The United States, Eric A. Feldman, Chelsea Darnell

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Does genetic information warrant special legal protection, and if so how should it be protected? This essay examines the most recent (and indeed only) significant effort by the US government to prohibit genetic discrimination, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). We argue that the legislation is unlikely to have the positive impact sought by advocates of genetic privacy and proponents of biobanks. In part, GINA disappoints because it does too little. Hailed by its promoters as “the first civil rights act of the 21st century,” GINA’s reach is in fact quite modest and its grasp even more so. But …


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

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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 …


Race, Gender, And Genetic Technologies: A New Reproductive Dystopia?, Dorothy E. Roberts Jan 2009

Race, Gender, And Genetic Technologies: A New Reproductive Dystopia?, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.


Confidentiality: An Expectation In Health Care, Anita L. Allen Jan 2008

Confidentiality: An Expectation In Health Care, Anita L. Allen

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The practice of confidentiality has continued in an era of increased, voluntary openness about medical information in everyday life. Indeed the number and variety of state and federal laws mandating confidentiality by medical professionals has increased in the last dozen years. Moreover, personal injury suits alleging breach of confidentiality or invasion of privacy, along with suits asserting evidentiary privileges, reflect the reality that expectations of confidentiality of medical records and relationships remain strong.


Face To Face With “It”: And Other Neglected Contexts Of Health Privacy, Anita L. Allen Oct 2007

Face To Face With “It”: And Other Neglected Contexts Of Health Privacy, Anita L. Allen

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“Illness has recently emerged from the obscurity of medical treatises and private diaries to acquire something like celebrity status,” Professor David Morris astutely observes. Great plagues and epidemics throughout history have won notoriety as collective disasters; and the Western world has made curiosities of an occasional “Elephant Man,” “Wild Boy,” or pair of enterprising “Siamese Twins.” People now reveal their illnesses and medical procedures in conversation, at work and on the internet. This paper explores the reasons why, despite the celebrity of disease and a new openness about health problems, privacy and confidentiality are still values in medicine.