Law Commons^™

Legal And Ethical Issues Associated With Employee Use Of Social Networks, Gundars Kaupins, Susan Park

Susan Park

Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter can help employees enhance a company’s marketing, recruiting, security, and safety. However, employee’s use of social networking sites and employers’ access of those sites can result in illegal and unethical behavior, such as discrimination and privacy invasions. Companies must gauge whether and how to rely upon employees’ use of personal social networking sites and how much freedom employees should have in using networks inside and outside of the companies. This research summarizes the latest legal and ethical issues regarding employee use of social networks and provides recommended corporate policies.

Immigration Surveillance, Anil Kalhan

Anil Kalhan

In recent years, immigration enforcement levels have soared, yielding a widely noted increase in the number of noncitizens removed from the United States. Less visible, however, has been an attendant sea change in the underlying nature of immigration governance itself, hastened by new surveillance and dataveillance technologies. Like many other areas of contemporary governance, immigration control has rapidly become an information-centered and technology-driven enterprise. At virtually every stage of the process of migrating or traveling to, from, and within the United States, both noncitizens and U.S. citizens are now subject to collection and analysis of extensive quantities of personal information …

Privacy, Copyright, And Letters, Jeffrey Harrison

Jeffrey L Harrison

The focus of this Essay is the privacy of letters – the written manifestations of thoughts, intents, and the recollections of facts directed to a person or a narrowly defined audience. The importance of this privacy is captured in the novel Atonement by Ian McEwan and in the film based on the novel. The fulcrum from which the action springs is a letter that is read by someone to whom it was not addressed. The result is literally life-changing, even disastrous for a number of characters. One person dies, two people seemingly meant for each other are torn apart and …

The Undue Burden: Parental Notification Requirements For Publicly Funded Contraception, Stephanie Bornstein

Stephanie Bornstein

This article analyzes the legal impact of legislative proposals in 1998 and 1999 to require parental notification for minors seeking publicly funded contraception. Part I explores the history of Title X and some of its amendments, the HHS interpretive “squeal rule,” and the federal courts' rejection of the HHS rule based on the congressional intent behind Title X. Part II focuses on the Parental Notification Act of 1998 and its likelihood for success against a constitutional challenge, based on an analysis of precedent on parental consent requirements for contraception and abortion. Part III discusses the change in the legislative and …

Privacy, Accountability, And The Cooperating Defendant: Towards A New Role For Internet Access To Court Records, Caren Morrison

Caren Myers Morrison

Now that federal court records are available online, anyone can obtain criminal case files instantly over the Internet. But this unfettered flow of information is in fundamental tension with many goals of the criminal justice system, including the integrity of criminal investigations, the accountability of prosecutors and the security of witnesses. It has also altered the behavior of prosecutors intent on protecting the identity of cooperating defendants who assist them in investigating other targets. As prosecutors and courts collaborate to obscure the process by which cooperators are recruited and rewarded, Internet availability, instead of enabling greater public understanding, risks degrading …

Foreign Direct Investment In Brazil From 2006 To 2008: Economic And Juridical Analysis Of American Depositary Receipts In The Brazilian Market, Claudia Ribeiro Pereira Nunes

Claudia Ribeiro Pereira Nunes

This paper studies the impact of American Depositary Receipts on the growth aspect of the Brazilian market and attempts to measure the market’s ability to foster the formation of new enterprises and encourage Brazil economic expansion. The hypothesis of this paper examines whether investment allocation decisions of mutual fund managers have helped or hindered the development of the local stock market in Brazil. For this study, it is necessary to investigate two research subjects: (i) the set of Brazilian macroeconomic policies performance, (ii) and exploration of the juridical structure of American Depositary Receipts. Research methodologies are theoretical literature review and …

Target, Negligence, Chips, And Chickens, Jesse D. Gossett

Jesse D Gossett

SHOPPING ON BLACK FRIDAY. It’s almost as American as baseball and apple pie. But during the 2013 holiday season, over forty million U.S. citizens experienced what is increasingly becoming a uniquely American problem: face-to-face (“FTF”) credit card fraud. This online article briefly explores the problems of data hacking and credit card fraud. It then looks at how European countries have largely avoided the problem and what American consumers can do to minimize the problem here.

Hate Crimes In Cyberspace, Danielle Citron

Danielle Keats Citron

Most Internet users are familiar with trolling—aggressive, foul-mouthed posts designed to elicit angry responses in a site’s comments. Less familiar but far more serious is the way some use networked technologies to target real people, subjecting them, by name and address, to vicious, often terrifying, online abuse. In an in-depth investigation of a problem that is too often trivialized by lawmakers and the media, Danielle Keats Citron exposes the startling extent of personal cyber-attacks and proposes practical, lawful ways to prevent and punish online harassment. A refutation of those who claim that these attacks are legal, or at least impossible …

ÜBerschussdaten In Retinabildern: Ein Beitrag Zum Datenschutzfreundlichen Entwurf Biometrischer Systeme, Michael Friedewald, Sebastian Wawrzyniak, Frank Pallas

Michael Friedewald

Die Retina ist wegen ihrer Unterscheidungskraft ein vielversprechendes biometrisches Merkmal, das vor allem für sicherheitsrelevante Systeme genutzt wird. Allerdings manifestieren sich auch zahlreiche Erkrankungen durch entsprechende Veränderungen der Retina. Die Nutzung solcher gesundheitsbezogener und für Zwecke der Authentifizierung unnötiger Daten ist daher unbedingt zu vermeiden. Dieser Beitrag befasst sich mit der Frage, welche gesundheitsrelevanten Informationen aus Retinabildern gewonnen werden können und welche Konsequenzen dies für den Entwurf biometrischer Systeme hat.

Light In The Darkness: How Leatpr Standards Guide Legislators In Regulating Law Enforcement Access To Cell Site Location Records, Susan Freiwald

Susan Freiwald

This article measures the new ABA Standards for Criminal Justice: Law Enforcement Access to Third Party Records (LEATPR Standards) success by assessing the guidance they provide legislators interested in updating pertinent law regarding one specific type of data. Scholars should not expect the Standards to yield the same conclusions they would have furnished had they been able to draft a set of standards by themselves. The Standards emerged after years of painstaking consensus building and compromise no individual committee member got entirely what he wanted. Nonetheless, not every product of a committee turns out to have been worth the effort, …

The Singapore Personal Data Protection Act And An Assessment Of Future Trends In Data Privacy, Warren B. Chik

Warren Bartholomew CHIK

In the first part of this paper, I will present and explain the Singapore Personal Data Protection Act (“PDPA”) in the context of legislative developments in the Asian region and against the well-established international baseline privacy standards. In the course of the above evaluation, reference will be made to the national laws and policy on data privacy prior to the enactment of the PDPA as well as current social and market practices in relation to personal data. In the second part of this paper, I will decipher and assess the future trends in data privacy reform and the future development …

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Free Speech? Visions Of The Future Of Copyright, Privacy And The First Amendment In Science Fiction, Daxton R. Stewart

Daxton "Chip" Stewart

Science fiction authors have long projected the future of technology, including communication devices and the way in which future societies may use them. In this essay, these visions of future technology, and their implications on the future of media law and policy, are explored in three areas in particular – copyright, privacy, and the First Amendment. Themes examined include moving toward massively open copyright systems, problems of perpetual surveillance by the state, addressing rights of obscurity in public places threatened by wearable and implantable computing devices, and considering free speech rights of autonomous machines created by humans. In conclusion, the …

When Enough Is Enough: Location Tracking, Mosaic Theory, And Machine Learning, Steven M. Bellovin, Renée M. Hutchins, Tony Jebara, Sebastian Zimmeck

Renée M. Hutchins

Since 1967, when it decided Katz v. United States, the Supreme Court has tied the right to be free of unwanted government scrutiny to the concept of reasonable xpectations of privacy.[1] An evaluation of reasonable expectations depends, among other factors, upon an assessment of the intrusiveness of government action. When making such assessment historically the Court has considered police conduct with clear temporal, geographic, or substantive limits. However, in an era where new technologies permit the storage and compilation of vast amounts of personal data, things are becoming more complicated. A school of thought known as “mosaic theory” has stepped …

Changing Your Name In New York: A Guide For Attorneys And The Self-Represented—Part Iii, Gerald Lebovits

Hon. Gerald Lebovits

No abstract provided.

The Scored Society: Due Process For Automated Predictions, Danielle Keats Citron, Frank A. Pasquale

Danielle Keats Citron

Big Data is increasingly mined to rank and rate individuals. Predictive algorithms assess whether we are good credit risks, desirable employees, reliable tenants, valuable customers—or deadbeats, shirkers, menaces, and “wastes of time.” Crucial opportunities are on the line, including the ability to obtain loans, work, housing, and insurance. Though automated scoring is pervasive and consequential, it is also opaque and lacking oversight. In one area where regulation does prevail—credit—the law focuses on credit history, not the derivation of scores from data.

Procedural regularity is essential for those stigmatized by “artificially intelligent” scoring systems. The American due process tradition should inform …

The Scored Society: Due Process For Automated Predictions, Danielle Keats Citron, Frank A. Pasquale

Frank A. Pasquale

Big Data is increasingly mined to rank and rate individuals. Predictive algorithms assess whether we are good credit risks, desirable employees, reliable tenants, valuable customers—or deadbeats, shirkers, menaces, and “wastes of time.” Crucial opportunities are on the line, including the ability to obtain loans, work, housing, and insurance. Though automated scoring is pervasive and consequential, it is also opaque and lacking oversight. In one area where regulation does prevail—credit—the law focuses on credit history, not the derivation of scores from data. Procedural regularity is essential for those stigmatized by “artificially intelligent” scoring systems. The American due process tradition should inform …

Big Data's Other Privacy Problem, James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann

Big Data has not one privacy problem, but two. We are accustomed to talking about surveillance of data subjects. But Big Data also enables disconcertingly close surveillance of its users. The questions we ask of Big Data can be intensely revealing, but, paradoxically, protecting subjects' privacy can require spying on users. Big Data is an ideology of technology, used to justify the centralization of information and power in data barons, pushing both subjects and users into a kind of feudal subordination. This short and polemical essay uses the Bloomberg Terminal scandal as a window to illuminate Big Data's other privacy …

Employee Internet Privacy: A Proposed Act That Balances Legitimate Employer Rights And Employee Privacy, Susan Park J.D.

Susan Park

No abstract provided.

Abidor V. Napolitano: Suspicionless Cell Phone And Laptop Searches At The Border Compromise The Fourth And First Amendments, Adam Lamparello, Charles Maclean

Adam Lamparello

The article explores the December 31, 2013 Abidor decision where the federal district court upheld the ongoing application of the border search exception as applied to deep, forensic searches of laptops and other digital devices. That exception allows suspicionless searches of any persons, effects, and “closed containers” crossing a border into the United States, and laptops and external hard drives are generally considered “closed containers” under the border search exception. We argue that the border search exception, grounded as it is in pre-digital age fact patterns, should no longer serve as precedent for border searches of the immense memories of …

Amicus Brief -- Riley V. California And United States V. Wurie, Charles E. Maclean, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

Warrantless searches of cell phone memory—after a suspect has been arrested, and after law enforcement has seized the phone—would have been unconstitutional at the time the Fourth Amendment was adopted, and are unconstitutional now. Simply stated, they are unreasonable. And reasonableness—not a categorical warrant requirement—is the “touchstone of Fourth Amendment analysis.”

Katz On A Hot Tin Roof: The Reasonable Expectation Of Privacy Is Rudderless In The Digital Age Unless Congress Continually Resets The Privacy Bar, Charles E. Maclean

Charles E. MacLean

The Katz reasonable expectation of privacy doctrine has lasting relevance in the digital age, but that relevance must be carefully and clearly guided in great detail by Congressional and state legislative enactments continually resetting the privacy bar as technology advances. In that way, the Katz “reasonableness” requirements are actually set by the legislative branch, thereby precluding courts from applying inapposite analogies to phone booths, cigarette packs, and business records. Once legislation provides the new contours of digital privacy, those legislative contours become the new “reasonable.”

This article calls upon Congress, and to a lesser extent, state legislatures, to control that …

« Le Droit À La Protection De La Vie Privée Comme Droit À Un Avenir Non Pré-Occupé, Et Comme Condition De Survenance Du Commun. » (Draft / Version Provisoire), Antoinette Rouvroy

Antoinette Rouvroy

No abstract provided.

Surveillance, Speech Suppression And Degradation Of The Rule Of Law In The “Post-Democracy Electronic State”, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

None of us can claim the quality of original insight achieved by Alexis de Tocqueville in his early 19th Century classic Democracy in America in his observation that the “soft” repression of democracy was unlike that in any other political form. It is impossible to deny that we in the US, the United Kingdom and Western Europe are experiencing just such a “gentle” drift of the kind that Tocqueville describes, losing our democratic integrity amid an increasingly “pretend” democracy. He explained: “[T]he supreme power [of government] then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society …

Nothing To Fear Or Nowhere To Hide: Competing Visions Of The Nsa's 215 Program, Susan Freiwald

Susan Freiwald

Despite Intelligence Community leaders’ assurances, the detailed knowledge of the NSA metadata program (the 215 program) that flowed from the Snowden revelations did not assuage concerns about the program. Three groups, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, brought immediate legal challenges with mixed results in the lower courts. The conflict, in the courts, Congress, and the press, has revealed that the proponents and opponents of Section 215 view the program in diametrically opposed ways. Program proponents see a vital intelligence program operating within legal limits, which has suffered a few compliance …

Defining ‘Personal Data’ In The European Union And U.S., Paul Schwartz

Paul M. Schwartz

No abstract provided.

Self, Privacy, And Power: Is It All Over? (With R. Sloan), Richard Warner

Richard Warner

The realization of a multifaceted self is an ideal one strives to realize. One realizes such a self in large part through interaction with others in various social roles. Such realization requires a significant degree of informational privacy. Informational privacy is the ability to determine for yourself when others may collect and how they may use your information. The realization of multifaceted selves requires informational privacy in public. There is no contradiction here: informational privacy is a matter of control, and you can have such control in public. Current information processing practices greatly reduce privacy in public thereby threatening the …

European Union Data Privacy Law Developments, W. Gregory Voss

W. Gregory Voss

This article explores recent developments in European Union data privacy and data protection law, through an analysis of European Union advisory guidance, independent administrative agency enforcement action, case law, and legislative reform in the areas of digital technologies, the internet, telecommunications and personal data. In the first case, Article 29 Working Party guidance on anonymization techniques – so important in the field of big data – is discussed and distinguished from pseudonymization. Next, Google privacy policy enforcement action by various EU Member State data protection agencies (inter alia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain) is chronicled, with lessons being …

Our Records Panopticon And The American Bar Association Standards For Criminal Justice, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

"Secrets are lies. Sharing is caring. Privacy is theft." So concludes the main character in Dave Egger’s novel The Circle, in which a single company that unites Google, Facebook, and Twitter – and on steroids – has the ambition not only to know, but also to share, all of the world's information. It is telling that a current dystopian novel features not the government in the first instance, but instead a private third party that, through no act of overt coercion, knows so much about us. This is indeed the greatest risk to privacy in our day, both the unprecedented …

Reforming The Grand Jury To Protect Privacy In Third Party Records, Stephen E. Henderson, Andrew E. Taslitz

Stephen E Henderson

In late 2014, two grand juries returned controversial no bill decisions in police killings, one in Ferguson, Missouri, and one in New York City. These outcomes have renewed calls for grand jury reform, and whatever one thinks of these particular processes and outcomes, such reform is long overdue. One logical source of reform to better respect privacy in records, which would have incidental benefits beyond this privacy focus, would be the newly enacted American Bar Association Standards for Criminal Justice on Law Enforcement Access to Third Party Records (LEATPR).

But LEATPR exempts from its requirements access to records via a …