Law Commons^™

Protecting One's Own Privacy In A Big Data Economy, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

Big Data is the vast quantities of information amenable to large-scale collection, storage, and analysis. Using such data, companies and researchers can deploy complex algorithms and artificial intelligence technologies to reveal otherwise unascertained patterns, links, behaviors, trends, identities, and practical knowledge. The information that comprises Big Data arises from government and business practices, consumer transactions, and the digital applications sometimes referred to as the “Internet of Things.” Individuals invisibly contribute to Big Data whenever they live digital lifestyles or otherwise participate in the digital economy, such as when they shop with a credit card, get treated at a hospital, apply …

The Privacy Policymaking Of State Attorneys General, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

Accounts of privacy law have focused on legislation, federal agencies, and the self-regulation of privacy professionals. Crucial agents of regulatory change, however, have been ignored: the state attorneys general. This article is the first in-depth study of the privacy norm entrepreneurship of state attorneys general. Because so little has been written about this phenomenon, I engaged with primary sources — first interviewing state attorneys general and current and former career staff, and then examining documentary evidence received through FOIA requests submitted to AG offices around the country.

Much as Justice Louis Brandeis imagined states as laboratories of the law, offices …

Trending @ Rwu Law: Linn F. Freedman's Post: The Goal Of Gender Equality In Cybersecurity 08/23/2016, Linn F. Freedman

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Important Steps To Maintain The Privacy Of Patients In The Hospital, Savera Aziz Ali, Minaz Mawani, Gulshan Bano, Sumera Aziz Ali

School of Nursing & Midwifery

Women are considered as vulnerable groups in our society in spite of their defined women rights by various laws. This shows that unfortunately these laws are not implemented practically in the real life. Society is shaped by the individuals and everyone should be responsible for advocating their own rights as well as the right of others especially of the vulnerable groups within the population.

The Positive Law Model Of The Fourth Amendment, William Baude, James Y. Stern

Faculty Publications

For fifty years, courts have used a “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard to define “searches” under the Fourth Amendment. As others have recognized, that doctrine is subjective, unpredictable, and conceptually confused, but viable alternatives have been slow to emerge. This Article supplies one.

We argue that Fourth Amendment protection should be anchored in background positive law. The touchstone of the search-and-seizure analysis should be whether government officials have done something forbidden to private parties. It is those actions that should be subjected to Fourth Amendment reasonableness review and the presumptive requirement to obtain a warrant. In short, Fourth Amendment protection …

13th Annual Diversity Symposium Dinner 04-07-2016, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Unilateral Invasions Of Privacy, Roger Allan Ford

Law Faculty Scholarship

Most people seem to agree that individuals have too little privacy, and most proposals to address that problem focus on ways to give those users more information about, and more control over, how information about them is used. Yet in nearly all cases, information subjects are not the parties who make decisions about how information is collected, used, and disseminated; instead, outsiders make unilateral decisions to collect, use, and disseminate information about others. These potential privacy invaders, acting without input from information subjects, are the parties to whom proposals to protect privacy must be directed. This Article develops a theory …

Against Data Exceptionalism, Andrew Keane Woods

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

One of the great regulatory challenges of the Internet era—indeed, one of today's most pressing privacy questions—is how to define the limits of government access to personal data stored in the cloud. This is particularly true today because the cloud has gone global, raising a number of questions about the proper reach of one state's authority over cloud-based data. The prevailing response to these questions by scholars, practitioners, and major Internet companies like Google and Facebook has been to argue that data is different. Data is “unterritorial,” they argue, and therefore incompatible with existing territorial notions of jurisdiction. This Article …

Newsroom: Margulies On Apple V. Fbi Standoff 02-18-2016, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Newsroom: Freedman On Credit Reports 02-12-2016, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Data Breaches, Identity Theft And Article Iii Standing: Will The Supreme Court Resolve The Split In The Circuits, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In data breach cases, the lower federal courts have split on the question of whether the plaintiffs meet Article III standing requirements for injury and causation. In its 2013 decision Clapper v. Amnesty International USA, the Supreme Court, in a case involving alleged electronic surveillance by the U.S. government’s National Security Agency, declared that a plaintiff alleging that it will suffer future injuries from a defendant’s allegedly improper conduct must show that such injuries are “certainly impending.” Since the Clapper decision, a majority of the lower federal courts addressing “lost data” or potential identity theft cases in which there is …

Lawn Signs: A Fourth Amendment For Constitutional Curmudgeons, Andrew Ferguson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

What is the constitutional significance of the proverbial "keep off the grass" sign? This question — asked by curmudgeonly neighbors everywhere — has been given new currency in a recent decision by the United States Supreme Court. Indeed, Florida v. Jardines might have bestowed constitutional curmudgeons with significant new Fourth Amendment protections. By expressing expectations regarding — and control over — access to property, "the people" may be able to claim greater Fourth Amendment protections not only for their homes, but also for their persons, papers, and effects. This article launches a constitutionally grounded, but lighthearted campaign of citizen education …

Classification Standards For Health Information: Ethical And Practical Approaches, Craig Konnoth

Publications

Secondary health information research requires vast quantities of data in order to make clinical and health delivery breakthroughs. Restrictive policies that limit the use of such information threaten to stymie this research. While the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for the new Common Rule permits patients to provide broad consent for the use of their information for research, that policy offers insufficient flexibility. This Article suggests a flexible consenting system that allows patients to consent to a range of privacy risks. The details of the system will be fleshed out in future work.

Use Of Facial Recognition Technology For Medical Purposes: Balancing Privacy With Innovation, Seema Mohapatra

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Notion And Practice Of Reputation And Professional Identity In Social Networking: From K-12 Through Law School, Roberta Bobbie Studwell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance And Wikipedia Use, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article discusses the results of the first empirical study providing evidence of regulatory “chilling effects” of Wikipedia users associated with online government surveillance. The study explores how traffic to Wikipedia articles on topics that raise privacy concerns for Wikipedia users decreased after the widespread publicity about NSA/PRISM surveillance revelations in June 2013. Using an interdisciplinary research design, the study tests the hypothesis, based on chilling effects theory, that traffic to privacy-sensitive Wikipedia articles reduced after the mass surveillance revelations. The Article finds not only a statistically significant immediate decline in traffic for these Wikipedia articles after June 2013, but …

Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance And Wikipedia Use, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article discusses the results of the first empirical study providing evidence of regulatory “chilling effects” of Wikipedia users associated with online government surveillance. The study explores how traffic to Wikipedia articles on topics that raise privacy concerns for Wikipedia users decreased after the widespread publicity about NSA/PRISM surveillance revelations in June 2013. Using an interdisciplinary research design, the study tests the hypothesis, based on chilling effects theory, that traffic to privacy-sensitive Wikipedia articles reduced after the mass surveillance revelations. The Article finds not only a statistically significant immediate decline in traffic for these Wikipedia articles after June 2013, but …

Cross-Cutting Conflicts: Developments In The Use Of Norwich Orders In Internet Defamation Cases, Robert Currie

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The anonymity afforded to those wishing to post commentary on the internet has given rise to a number of procedural issues in Canadian case law. This paper focuses on one such issue: the need for prospective plaintiffs in defamation actions to "unmask" anonymous commentators in order to be able to bring proceedings against them. It tracks the increasing use of the "Norwich order," A.K.A an order for pre-action discovery, as a means of accomplishing this objective, by examining the leading case of Warman v. Fournier and analyzing how this issue has played out in litigation to date. It also considers …

Electronic Devices At The Border: The Next Frontier Of Canadian Search And Seizure Law?, Robert Currie

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Over the last several years the Supreme Court of Canada has developed its jurisprudence regarding the search and seizure of electronic devices, applying section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in such a way as to assert and protect a significant amount of privacy in the devices and their data. Recent cases regarding the search of devices at Canada’s borders, however, do not reflect this case law. This is a situation made all the more complex by the generally attenuated expectation of privacy in the border context, and is worthy of inquiry. Using a pending border case …

Riley V. California And The Beginning Of The End For The Third-Party Search Doctrine, David A. Harris

Articles

In Riley v. California, the Supreme Court decided that when police officers seize a smart phone, they may not search through its contents -- the data found by looking into the call records, calendars, pictures and so forth in the phone -- without a warrant. In the course of the decision, the Court said that the rule applied not just to data that was physically stored on the device, but also to data stored "in the cloud" -- in remote sites -- but accessed through the device. This piece of the decision may, at last, allow a re-examination of …

When The Default Is No Penalty: Negotiating Privacy At The Ntia, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

Consumer privacy protection is largely within the purview of the Federal Trade Commission. In recent years, however, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) at the Department of Commerce has hosted multistakeholder negotiations on consumer privacy issues. The NTIA process has addressed mobile apps, facial recognition, and most recently, drones. It is meant to serve as a venue for industry self-regulation. Drawing on the literature on co-regulation and on penalty defaults, I suggest that the NTIA process struggles to successfully extract industry expertise and participation against a dearth of federal data privacy law and enforcement. This problem is most exacerbated …

Taking Trust Seriously In Privacy Law, Neil Richards, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Trust is beautiful. The willingness to accept vulnerability to the actions of others is the essential ingredient for friendship, commerce, transportation, and virtually every other activity that involves other people. It allows us to build things, and it allows us to grow. Trust is everywhere, but particularly at the core of the information relationships that have come to characterize our modern, digital lives. Relationships between people and their ISPs, social networks, and hired professionals are typically understood in terms of privacy. But the way we have talked about privacy has a pessimism problem – privacy is conceptualized in negative terms, …

The Internet Of Heirlooms And Disposable Things, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger

Faculty Scholarship

The Internet of Things (“IoT”) is here, and we seem to be going all in. We are trying to put a microchip in nearly every object that is not nailed down and even a few that are. Soon, your cars, toasters, toys, and even your underwear will be wired up to make your lives better. The general thought seems to be that “Internet connectivity makes good objects great.” While the IoT might be incredibly useful, we should proceed carefully. Objects are not necessarily better simply because they are connected to the Internet. Often, the Internet can make objects worse and …

Anonymization And Risk, Ira S. Rubinstein, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Perfect anonymization of data sets that contain personal information has failed. But the process of protecting data subjects in shared information remains integral to privacy practice and policy. While the deidentification debate has been vigorous and productive, there is no clear direction for policy. As a result, the law has been slow to adapt a holistic approach to protecting data subjects when data sets are released to others. Currently, the law is focused on whether an individual can be identified within a given set. We argue that the best way to move data release policy past the alleged failures of …