Law Commons^™

Deepfake Privacy: Attitudes And Regulation, Matthew B. Kugler, Carly Pace

Northwestern University Law Review

Using only a series of images of a person’s face and publicly available software, it is now possible to insert the person’s likeness into a video and show them saying or doing almost anything. This “deepfake” technology has permitted an explosion of political satire and, especially, fake pornography. Several states have already passed laws regulating deepfakes, and more are poised to do so. This Article presents three novel empirical studies that assess public attitudes toward this new technology. In our main study, a representative sample of the U.S. adult population perceived nonconsensually created pornographic deepfake videos as extremely harmful and …

Pure Privacy, Jeffrey Bellin

Northwestern University Law Review

In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis began a storied legal tradition of trying to conceptualize privacy. Since that time, privacy’s appeal has grown beyond those authors’ wildest expectations, but its essence remains elusive. One of the rare points of agreement in boisterous academic privacy debates is that there is no consensus on what privacy means.

The modern trend is to embrace the ambiguity. Unable to settle on boundaries, scholars welcome a broad array of interests into an expanding theoretical framework. As a result, privacy is invoked in debates about COVID-19 contact tracing, police body cameras, marriage equality, facial recognition, …

The Fourth Amendment Stripped Bare: Substantiating Prisoners' Reasonable Right To Bodily Privacy, Meher Babbar

Northwestern University Law Review

Prisoners’ rights to bodily privacy under the Fourth Amendment are limited, allowing detention officials to strip-search them for contraband. The extent to which the Fourth Amendment protects prisoners, however, is uncertain. Questions regarding whether strip searches require reasonable suspicion and the manner in which officials may conduct strip searches have troubled courts for decades. In the absence of clear guidance from the Supreme Court, courts have reached inconsistent conclusions, imperiling the human rights and dignity of prisoners. This Note argues that courts should define and apply prisoners’ rights to bodily privacy with reference to international human-rights law, specifically the United …