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A Comment On Privacy And Accountability In Black-Box Medicine, Carl E. Schneider Apr 2017

A Comment On Privacy And Accountability In Black-Box Medicine, Carl E. Schneider

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Human institutions and activities cannot avoid failures. Anxiety about them often provokes governments to try to prevent those failures. When that anxiety is vivid and urgent, government may do so without carefully asking whether regulation’s costs justify their benefits. Privacy and Accountability in Black Box Medicine admirably labors to bring discipline and rationality to thinking about an important development — the rise of “black-box medicine” — before it causes injuries regulation should have prevented and before it is impaired by improvident regulation. That is, Privacy and Accountability weighs the costs against the benefits of various forms of regulation across the …


Privacy And Accountability In Black-Box Medicine, Roger Allan Ford, W. Nicholson Price Ii Jan 2016

Privacy And Accountability In Black-Box Medicine, Roger Allan Ford, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Black-box medicine—the use of big data and sophisticated machine-learning techniques for health-care applications—could be the future of personalized medicine. Black-box medicine promises to make it easier to diagnose rare diseases and conditions, identify the most promising treatments, and allocate scarce resources among different patients. But to succeed, it must overcome two separate, but related, problems: patient privacy and algorithmic accountability. Privacy is a problem because researchers need access to huge amounts of patient health information to generate useful medical predictions. And accountability is a problem because black-box algorithms must be verified by outsiders to ensure they are accurate and unbiased, …


Geographically Restricted Streaming Content And Evasion Of Geolocation: The Applicability Of The Copyright Anticircumvention Rules, Jerusha Burnett Jan 2013

Geographically Restricted Streaming Content And Evasion Of Geolocation: The Applicability Of The Copyright Anticircumvention Rules, Jerusha Burnett

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

A number of methods currently exist or are being developed to determine where Internet users are located geographically when they access a particular webpage. Yet regardless of the precautions taken by website operators to limit the locations from which they allow access, it is likely that users will find ways to gain access to restricted content. Should the evasion of geolocation constitute circumvention of access controls so that § 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") applies? Because location data can properly be considered personally identifiable information ("PII"), this Note argues that § 1201 should not apply absent a …


Privacy Policies, Terms Of Service, And Ftc Enforcement: Broadening Unfairness Regulation For A New Era, G. S. Hans Jan 2012

Privacy Policies, Terms Of Service, And Ftc Enforcement: Broadening Unfairness Regulation For A New Era, G. S. Hans

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

This Note examines website privacy policies in the context of FTC regulation. The relevant portion of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, 15 U.S.C. § 45(a), uses the following language to define the scope of the agency's regulatory authority: "Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful." Specifically, this Note analyzes the FTC's power to regulate unfair practices (referred to as the FTC's "unfairness power") granted by Section 5, and also discusses the deception prong of Section 5, which allows the agency to …


Property As Control: The Case Of Information, Jane B. Baron Jan 2012

Property As Control: The Case Of Information, Jane B. Baron

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

If heath policy makers' wishes come true, by the end of the current decade the paper charts in which most of our medical information is currently recorded will be replaced by networked electronic health records ("EHRs").[...] Like all computerized records, networked EHRs are difficult to secure, and the information in EHRs is both particularly sensitive and particularly valuable for commercial purposes. Sadly, the existing federal statute meant to address this problem, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 ("HIPAA"), is probably inadequate to the task.[...] Health law, privacy, and intellectual property scholars have all suggested that the river …


No Cause Of Action: Video Surveillance In New York City, Olivia J. Greer Jan 2012

No Cause Of Action: Video Surveillance In New York City, Olivia J. Greer

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

In 2010, New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly announced a new network of video surveillance in the City. The new network would be able to prevent future terrorist attacks by identifying suspicious behavior before catastrophic events could take place. Kelly told reporters, "If we're looking for a person in a red jacket, we can call up all the red jackets filmed in the last 30 days," and "[w]e're beginning to use software that can identify suspicious objects or behaviors." Gothamist later made a witticism of Kelly's statement, remarking, "Note to terrorists: red jackets are not a good look for …


Does Law Matter Online - Empirical Evidence On Privacy Law Compliance, Michael Birnhack, Niva Elkin-Koren Jan 2011

Does Law Matter Online - Empirical Evidence On Privacy Law Compliance, Michael Birnhack, Niva Elkin-Koren

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Does law matter in the information environment? What can we learn from the experience of applying a particular legal regime to the online environment? Informational privacy (or to use the European term, data protection) provides an excellent illustration of the challenges faced by regulators who seek to secure user rights and shape online behavior. A comprehensive study of Israeli website compliance with information privacy regulation in 2003 and 2006 provides insights for understanding these challenges. The study examined the information privacy practices of 1360 active websites, determining the extent to which these sites comply with applicable legal requirements related to …


A Path Toward User Control Of Online Profiling, Tracy A. Steindel Jan 2011

A Path Toward User Control Of Online Profiling, Tracy A. Steindel

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Online profiling is "the practice of tracking information about consumers' interests by monitoring their movements online." A primary purpose of online profiling is to "deliver advertising tailored to the individual's interests," a practice known as online behavioral advertising (OBA). In order to accomplish this, publishers and advertisers track a individual's online behavior using cookies and other means. Publishers and advertisers aggregate the information, often compile it with information from offline sources, and sort individuals into groups based on characteristics such as age, income, and hobbies. Advertisers can then purchase access to these consumer groups, controlling their selections with such specificity …


There Is A Time To Keep Silent And A Time To Speak, The Hard Part Is Knowing Which Is Which: Striking The Balance Between Privacy Protection And The Flow Of Health Care Information, Daniel J. Gilman, James C. Cooper Jan 2010

There Is A Time To Keep Silent And A Time To Speak, The Hard Part Is Knowing Which Is Which: Striking The Balance Between Privacy Protection And The Flow Of Health Care Information, Daniel J. Gilman, James C. Cooper

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Health information technology (HIT) has become a signal element of federal health policy, especially as the recently enacted American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act or ARRA) comprises numerous provisions related to HIT and commits tens of billions of dollars to its development and adoption. These provisions charge various agencies of the federal government with both general and specific HIT-related implementation tasks including, inter alia, providing funding for HIT in various contexts: the implementation of interoperable HIT, HIT-related infrastructure, and HIT-related training and research. The Recovery Act also contains various regulatory provisions pertaining to HIT. Provisions of the …


When Mobile Phones Are Rfid-Equipped - Finding E.U.-U.S. Solutions To Protect Consumer Privacy And Facilitate Mobile Commerce, Nancy J. King Jan 2008

When Mobile Phones Are Rfid-Equipped - Finding E.U.-U.S. Solutions To Protect Consumer Privacy And Facilitate Mobile Commerce, Nancy J. King

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

New mobile phones have been designed to include delivery of mobile advertising and other useful location-based services, but have they also been designed to protect consumers' privacy? One of the key enabling technologies for these new types of phones and new mobile services is Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), a wireless communication technology that enables the unique identification of tagged objects. In the case of RFID-enabled mobile phones, the personal nature of the devices makes it very likely that, by locating a phone, businesses will also be able to locate its owner. Consumers are currently testing new RFID-enabled phones around the …


Password Theft: Rethinking An Old Crime In A New Era, Daniel S. Shamah Oct 2006

Password Theft: Rethinking An Old Crime In A New Era, Daniel S. Shamah

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

By putting themselves out in front as the victims, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) helped reshape the governing norms of the times, and as a result, people viewed the act of file-sharing differently. By forcing people to see music downloading as a form of theft, the RIAA was quite successful in deterring it. In the process, they also proposed a radical view of theft that changes our basic economic understandings of the action[...] This paper argues that the RIAA's model for deterring music theft could be successfully used to deter many other forms of computer theft, and, specifically, …


'Code' And The Slow Erosion Of Privacy, Bert-Jaap Koops, Ronald Leenes Sep 2005

'Code' And The Slow Erosion Of Privacy, Bert-Jaap Koops, Ronald Leenes

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

The notion of software code replacing legal code as a mechanism to control human behavior--"code as law"--is often illustrated with examples in intellectual property and freedom of speech. This Article examines the neglected issue of the impact of "code as law" on privacy. To what extent is privacy-related "code" being used, either to undermine or to enhance privacy? On the basis of cases in the domains of law enforcement, national security, E-government, and commerce, it is concluded that technology rarely incorporates specific privacy-related norms. At the same time, however, technology very often does have clear effects on privacy, as it …


Constitutional Issues In Information Privacy, Fred H. Cate, Robert Litan Oct 2002

Constitutional Issues In Information Privacy, Fred H. Cate, Robert Litan

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

The U.S. Constitution has been largely ignored in the recent flurry of privacy laws and regulations designed to protect personal information from incursion by the private sector despite the fact that many of these enactments and efforts to enforce them significantly implicate the First Amendment. Questions about the role of the Constitution have assumed new importance in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Recent efforts to identify and apprehend terrorists and to protect against future attacks threaten to weaken constitutional protections against government intrusions into personal privacy. However, these …


The Emergence Of Website Privacy Norms, Steven A. Hetcher Jun 2001

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, …