Science and Technology Law Commons^™

The Emergence Of Website Privacy Norms, Steven A. Hetcher

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Part I of the Article will first look at the original privacy norms that emerged at the Web's inception in the early 1990s. Two groups have been the main contributors to the emergence of these norms; the thousands of commercial websites on the early Web, on the one hand, and the millions of users of the early Web, on the other hand. The main structural feature of these norms was that websites benefitted through the largely unrestricted collection of personal data while consumers suffered injury due to the degradation of their personal privacy from this data collection. In other words, …

Two Fallacies About Dna Data Banks For Law Enforcement, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

This commentary on the article Legal and Policy Issues in Expanding the Scope of Law Enforcement DNA Data Banks, 67 Brook. L. Rev. 127 (2001), by Mark Rothstein and Sandra Carnahan, argues that the case for confining law enforcement DNA databases to noncoding loci and to samples from individuals convicted of violent crimes is quite weak.

It describes alternative approaches, including the possibility of a population-wide database; the privacy implications of the loci now used in forensic identification; the law governing DNA dragnets; and the limits on DNA databases imposed by recent cases on searches and seizures. It notes the …

The Constitutionality Of Dna Sampling On Arrest, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

Every state now collects DNA from people convicted of certain offenses. Law enforcement authorities promote offender DNA databanking on the theory that it will identify offenders who commit additional crimes while or probation or parole, or after they have finished serving their sentences. Even relatively small databases have yielded such dividends. As these database searches uncover the perpetrators of rapes, murders, and other offenses, the pressure builds to expand the coverage of the databases.

Recent proposals call for extending not merely the scope of crimes for which DNA databanking would be used, but also the point at which the samples …

Privacy, Ideology, And Technology: A Response To Jeffrey Rosen, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay reviews Jeffrey Rosen’s The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America (2000).

Rosen offers a compelling (and often hair-raising) account of the pervasive dissolution of the boundary between public and private information. This dissolution is both legal and social; neither the law nor any other social institution seems to recognize many limits on the sorts of information that can be subjected to public scrutiny. The book also provides a rich, evocative characterization of the dignitary harms caused by privacy invasion. Rosen’s description of the sheer unfairness of being “judged out of context” rings instantly true. Privacy, Rosen …