Law Commons^™

Designing Respectful Tech: What Is Your Relationship With Technology?, Noreen Y. Whysel

Publications and Research

According to research at the Me2B Alliance, people feel they have a relationship with technology. It’s emotional. It’s embodied. And it’s very personal. We are studying digital relationships to answer questions like “Do people have a relationship with technology?” “What does that relationship feel like?” And “Do people understand the commitments that they are making when they explore, enter into and dissolve these relationships?” There are parallels between messy human relationships and the kinds of relationships that people develop with technology. As with human relationships, we move through states of discovery, commitment and breakup with digital applications as well. Technology …

Dismantling The “Black Opticon”: Privacy, Race Equity, And Online Data-Protection Reform, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

African Americans online face three distinguishable but related categories of vulnerability to bias and discrimination that I dub the “Black Opticon”: discriminatory oversurveillance, discriminatory exclusion, and discriminatory predation. Escaping the Black Opticon is unlikely without acknowledgement of privacy’s unequal distribution and privacy law’s outmoded and unduly race-neutral façade. African Americans could benefit from race-conscious efforts to shape a more equitable digital public sphere through improved laws and legal institutions. This Essay critically elaborates the Black Opticon triad and considers whether the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (2021), the federal Data Protection Act (2021), and new resources for the Federal Trade …

A Proportionality-Based Framework For Government Regulation Of Digital Tracing Apps In Times Of Emergency, Sharon Bassan

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Times of emergency present an inherent conflict between the public interest and the preservation of individual rights. Such times require granting emergency powers to the government on behalf of the public interest and relaxing safeguards against government actions that infringe rights. The lack of theoretical framework to assess governmental decisions in times of emergency leads to a polarized and politicized discourse about potential policies, and often, to public distrust and lack of compliance.

Such a discourse was evident regarding Digital Tracing Apps (“DTAs”), which are apps installed on cellular phones to alert users that they were exposed to people who …

Book Review: This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race (2020) By Nicole Perlroth, Amy C. Gaudion

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

No abstract provided.