Alexa, Who Owns My Pillow Talk? Contracting, Collaterizing, And Monetizing Consumer Privacy Through Voice-Captured Personal Data, 2018 Catholic University of America (Student)
Alexa, Who Owns My Pillow Talk? Contracting, Collaterizing, And Monetizing Consumer Privacy Through Voice-Captured Personal Data, Anne Logsdon Smith
Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology
With over one-fourth of households in the U.S. alone now using voice-activated digital assistant devices such as Amazon’s Echo (better known as “Alexa”) and Google’s Home, companies are recording and transmitting record volumes of voice data from the privacy of people’s homes to servers across the globe. These devices capture conversations about everything from online shopping to food preferences to entertainment recommendations to bedtime stories, and even phone and appliance use. With “Big Data” and business analytics expected to be a $203 billion-plus industry by 2020, companies are racing to acquire and leverage consumer data by selling it, licensing it, …
Freedom To Discriminate: Assessing The Lawfulness And Utility Of Biased Broadband Networks, 2018 Vanderbilt University Law School
Freedom To Discriminate: Assessing The Lawfulness And Utility Of Biased Broadband Networks, Rob Frieden
Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law
This Article assesses the potential for harm to broadband consumers and competitors when Internet service providers (ISPs) tier service by combining so-called "unlimited usage" with reduced video image resolution and also by not metering usage when subscribers access specific content sources. ISPs previously generated no regulatory concerns when they developed different tiers of service and price points based on content transmission speeds and monthly allotment of data consumption.
However, recent "zero rating" and "unlimited" data offers have triggered questions as to whether ISPs engage in unlawful paid prioritization of certain traffic from specific sources or in traffic degradation by receiving …
Corporate Cybersecurity: The International Threat To Private Networks And How Regulations Can Mitigate It, 2018 Vanderbilt University Law School
Corporate Cybersecurity: The International Threat To Private Networks And How Regulations Can Mitigate It, Eric J. Hyla
Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law
Cyberattacks are occurring at an accelerating pace. Foreign nations are increasingly utilizing hacking as a tool for economic gain, acts of aggression, or international political expression. At risk are US consumers'personal data, private firms' bottom line, and the economies'integrity. In response, federal and state lawmakers have issued a series of disparate, uncoordinated policies seeking to strengthen cybersecurity practices. However, recent events indicate that these policies are less than ideal. This Note suggests that a unified response to cybersecurity is required and calls for the establishment of a single, central federal agency with authority over all cybersecurity regulations. Such an agency …
Democracy At Stake In The Digital Age: Engaging In The Net Neutrality Debate For The Preservation Of Free Speech And The Redemption Of Public Interest, 2018 Claremont McKenna College
Democracy At Stake In The Digital Age: Engaging In The Net Neutrality Debate For The Preservation Of Free Speech And The Redemption Of Public Interest, Christina (Sung Min) Yoh
CMC Senior Theses
Net neutrality is currently one of the most topical government policies up for debate. In the following paper, I will examine three cases in which net neutrality has been threatened by internet service providers and the Federal Communications Commission and reinforced by public interest groups, major website companies, and the public. The online regime has been a critical instrument in the outcome of all three cases, highlighting the role and influence of internet users in the virtual and physical public spheres.
Some say that the battle is already lost. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and his Republican majority in the agency …
Symposium: Truth, Trust And The First Amendment In The Digital Age: Foreword: Whither The Fourth Estate?, 2018 University of Florida Levin College of Law
Symposium: Truth, Trust And The First Amendment In The Digital Age: Foreword: Whither The Fourth Estate?, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky
UF Law Faculty Publications
As a professor of Media Law, I have devoted my career over the past quarter of a century to the idea that the press plays a special role in our democracy. That role is largely encapsulated by the concept of the press as Fourth Estate – an unofficial branch of government in our scheme of separation of powers that checks the power of the three official branches. In our constitutional scheme, the press is the watchdog that informs us what the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government are up to and continually replenishes the stock of news – real …
The Tipping Point – Reevaluating The Asnef-Equifax Separation Of Competition Of Data Privacy Law In The Wake Of The 2017 Equifax Data Breach, 2018 Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
The Tipping Point – Reevaluating The Asnef-Equifax Separation Of Competition Of Data Privacy Law In The Wake Of The 2017 Equifax Data Breach, Olivia Altmayer
Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business
Contrary to the Court of Justice for the European Union’s decision in the Asnef-Equifax case, in a world of big data, it is inefficient and ineffective to treat EU competition law and EU data protection law as entirely separate legal considerations. Reevaluating this stance is critical in sectors where customer data is highly sensitive, and therefore highly valuable to those who steal it, particularly for the financial and healthcare sectors. Looking forward, companies that store and use biometric data will have to be similarly scrutinized. To correct this problem, the EU has numerous paths it can take: (a) continue as …
Defamation And Privacy In The Social Media Age: What Would Justice Brennan Think?, 2018 American University Washington College of Law
Defamation And Privacy In The Social Media Age: What Would Justice Brennan Think?, Stephen Wermiel
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
No abstract provided.
"Enemy Of The People": Negotiating News At The White House, 2018 Texas A&M University School of Law
"Enemy Of The People": Negotiating News At The White House, Carol Pauli
Faculty Scholarship
How can the press serve as a check on executive power when the president calls it “fake” and the White House denies facts? As journalists debate the right response, this article offers advice from the perspective of a journalist who is now in the legal academy. Drawing on legal scholarship in the field of conflict resolution — as well as literature in journalism and political science — this article analyzes the White House press briefing as a negotiation over both the content of news and the relationship of the press and president. It aims to help the press fulfill the …
Real "Fake News" And Fake "Fake News", 2018 University of Miami School of Law
Learned Hand's Seven Other Ideas About The Freedom Of Speech, 2018 Columbia Law School
Learned Hand's Seven Other Ideas About The Freedom Of Speech, Vincent A. Blasi
Faculty Scholarship
I say “other” because, regarding the freedom of speech, Learned Hand has suffered the not uncommon fate of having his best ideas either drowned out or credited exclusively to others due to the excessive attention that has been bestowed on one of his lesser ideas. Sitting as a district judge in the case of Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, Hand wrote the earliest judicial opinion about the freedom of speech that has attained canonical status. He ruled that under the recently passed Espionage Act of 1917, writings critical of government cannot be grounds for imposing criminal punishment or the …
"I Call Alexa To The Stand": The Privacy Implications Of Anthropomorphizing Virtual Assistants Accompanying Smart-Home Technology, 2018 Vanderbilt University Law School
"I Call Alexa To The Stand": The Privacy Implications Of Anthropomorphizing Virtual Assistants Accompanying Smart-Home Technology, Christopher B. Burkett
Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law
This Note offers a solution to the unique privacy issues posed by the increasingly humanlike interactions users have with virtual assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa, which accompany smart-home technology. These interactions almost certainly result in the users engaging in the cognitive phenomenon of anthropomorphism--more specifically, an assignment of agency. This is a phenomenon that has heretofore been ignored in the legal context, but both the rapidity of technological advancement and inadequacy of current applicable legal doctrine necessitate its consideration now. Since users view these anthropomorphized virtual assistants as persons rather than machines, the law should treat them as such. To …
Fifty Years Of Foia In Operation, 1967-2017, 2018 Villanova University
Fifty Years Of Foia In Operation, 1967-2017, Tuan N. Samahon
Working Paper Series
No abstract provided.
What Authorizes The Image? The Visual Economy Of Post-Secular Jurisprudence, 2018 New York Law School
What Authorizes The Image? The Visual Economy Of Post-Secular Jurisprudence, Richard Sherwin
Articles & Chapters
In law’s visual economy our commitment to justice grows out of a renewed encounter with an interior libidinal source whose ongoing collective investment binds us to the nomos in which we live. We experience this corporeal bond in paintings, films, and video images on screens large and small. In the ethically inflected aesthetic of post-secular jurisprudence, justice is to law as beauty is to art. As distant as an abstract expressionist canvas, as close as any neighbor, or indeed any screen on which the neighbor becomes real to us. That is where we behold the source and instantiation of law’s …
Introduction: Troubling Transparency, 2018 Columbia Law School
Introduction: Troubling Transparency, David E. Pozen, Michael Schudson
Faculty Scholarship
Transparency is a value in the ascendance. Across the globe, the past several decades have witnessed a spectacular explosion of legislative reforms and judicial decisions calling for greater disclosure about the workings of public institutions. Freedom of information laws have proliferated, claims of a constitutional or supra-constitutional "right to know" have become commonplace, and an international transparency lobby has emerged as a civil society powerhouse. Open government is seen today in many quarters as a foundation of, if not synonymous with, good government.
At the same time, a growing number of scholars, advocates, and regulators have begun to raise hard …
Why Courts Fail To Protect Privacy: Race, Age, Bias, And Technology, 2018 Boston University School of Law
Why Courts Fail To Protect Privacy: Race, Age, Bias, And Technology, Christopher Robertson, Bernard Chao, Ian Farrell, Catherine Durso
Faculty Scholarship
The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable “searches and seizures,” but in the digital age of stingray devices and IP tracking, what constitutes a search or seizure? The Supreme Court has held that the threshold question is supposed to depend on and reflect the “reasonable expectations” of ordinary members of the public concerning their own privacy. For example, the police now exploit the “third party” doctrine to access data held by email and cell phone providers, without securing a warrant, on the Supreme Court’s intuition that the public has no expectation of privacy in that information. Is that assumption correct? If …
Narrative Topoi In The Digital Age, 2018 Boston University School of Law
Narrative Topoi In The Digital Age, Jessica Silbey, Zahr Said
Faculty Scholarship
Decades of thoughtful law and humanities scholarship have made the case for using humanistic texts and methods in the legal classroom. We build on that scholarship by identifying and describing three “narrative topoi” of the twenty-first century – podcasts, twitter and fake news. We use the term “topos” (from the Greek meaning “place”) and its plural, “topoi,” to mean “a literary commonplace” and “general setting for discussion” in the context of literary forms. Like an identifiable genre, narrative topoi are familiar story paths for audiences to travel. These narrative topoi live in contemporary popular culture and are products of digital …
Are Privacy Laws Deficient?, 2018 Boston University School of Law
Are Privacy Laws Deficient?, Woodrow Hartzog
Faculty Scholarship
Privacy law around the world is deficient because it ignores design. Lawmakers have attempted to establish limits on the collection, use, and distribution of personal information. But they have largely overlooked the power of design. They have discounted the role that design plays in facilitating the conduct and harm privacy law is meant to prevent. Design pitches and picks privacy winners and losers, with people as data subjects and surveillance objects often on the losing side.
What About Small Businesses? The Gdpr And Its Consequences For Small U.S.-Based Companies, 2017 Brooklyn Law School
What About Small Businesses? The Gdpr And Its Consequences For Small U.S.-Based Companies, Craig Mcallister
Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law
Fast-approaching changes to European data privacy law will have consequences around the globe. Historically, despite having dramatically different approaches to data privacy and data protection, the European Union and the United States developed a framework to ensure that the highspeed freeway that is transatlantic data transfer moved uninterrupted. That framework was overturned in the wake of revelations regarding U.S. surveillance practices, and amidst skepticism that the United States did not adequately protect personal data. Further, the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a sweeping overhaul of the legal data protection landscape that will take effect in May …
Fake News: No One Is Liable, And That Is A Problem, 2017 University at Buffalo School of Law (Student)
Fake News: No One Is Liable, And That Is A Problem, Emma M. Savino
Buffalo Law Review
No abstract provided.
The Fragility Of The Free American Press, 2017 University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law
The Fragility Of The Free American Press, Ronnell Andersen Jones, Sonja R. West
Northwestern University Law Review
President Donald Trump has faced criticism for attacking the press and for abandoning longstanding traditions of accommodating and respecting it. This Essay argues that the national discussion spurred by Trump’s treatment of the press has fallen short of capturing the true seriousness of the situation. Trump’s assault on the custom of press accommodation follows a generation-long collapse of other major press protections. In order to fully understand the critical juncture at which American press freedom now stands, we must expand the discussion beyond talk of a rogue president’s aberrant attacks on the press and consider the increasingly fragile edifice on …