Law Commons^™

The Promise And Perils Of Tech Whistleblowing, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Whistleblowers and leakers wield significant influence in technology law and policy. On topics ranging from cybersecurity to free speech, tech whistleblowers spur congressional hearings, motivate the introduction of legislation, and animate critical press coverage of tech firms. But while scholars and policymakers have long called for transparency and accountability in the tech sector, they have overlooked the significance of individual disclosures by industry insiders—workers, employees, and volunteers—who leak information that firms would prefer to keep private.

This Article offers an account of the rise and influence of tech whistleblowing. Radical information asymmetries pervade tech law and policy. Firms exercise near-complete …

Kafka In The Age Of Ai And The Futility Of Privacy As Control, Daniel Solove, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Despite writing more than a century ago, Franz Kafka captured the core problem of digital technologies—how individuals are rendered powerless and vulnerable. Over the past fifty years, and especially in the twenty-first century, privacy laws have been sprouting up around the world. These laws are often based heavily on an Individual Control Model that aims to empower individuals with rights to help them control the collection, use, and disclosure of their data.

In this Article, we argue that although Kafka starkly shows us the plight of the disempowered individual, his work also paradoxically suggests that empowering the individual isn’t the …

Two Ai Truths And A Lie, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Industry will take everything it can in developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. We will get used to it. This will be done for our benefit. Two of these things are true and one of them is a lie. It is critical that lawmakers identify them correctly. In this Essay, I argue that no matter how AI systems develop, if lawmakers do not address the dynamics of dangerous extraction, harmful normalization, and adversarial self-dealing, then AI systems will likely be used to do more harm than good.

Given these inevitabilities, lawmakers will need to change their usual approach to regulating technology. …

The Great Scrape: The Clash Between Scraping And Privacy, Daniel J. Solove, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems depend on massive quantities of data, often gathered by “scraping” – the automated extraction of large amounts of data from the internet. A great deal of scraped data is about people. This personal data provides the grist for AI tools such as facial recognition, deep fakes, and generative AI. Although scraping enables web searching, archival, and meaningful scientific research, scraping for AI can also be objectionable or even harmful to individuals and society.

Organizations are scraping at an escalating pace and scale, even though many privacy laws are seemingly incongruous with the practice. In this Article, …