Law Commons^™

Data Privacy, Human Rights, And Algorithmic Opacity, Sylvia Lu

Fellow, Adjunct, Lecturer, and Research Scholar Works

Decades ago, it was difficult to imagine a reality in which artificial intelligence (AI) could penetrate every corner of our lives to monitor our innermost selves for commercial interests. Within just a few decades, the private sector has seen a wild proliferation of AI systems, many of which are more powerful and penetrating than anticipated. In many cases, AI systems have become “the power behind the throne,” tracking user activities and making fateful decisions through predictive analysis of personal information. Despite the growing power of AI, proprietary algorithmic systems can be technically complex, legally claimed as trade secrets, and managerially …

Teaching Information Privacy Law, Joseph A. Tomain

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Teaching information privacy law is exciting and challenging because of the fast pace of technological and legal development and because "information privacy law" sprawls across a vast array of disparate areas of substantive law that do not automatically connect. This Essay provides one approach to teaching this fascinating, doctrinally diverse, and rapidly moving area of law. Through the framework of ten key course themes, this pedagogical approach seeks to help students find a common thread that connects these various areas of law into a cohesive whole. This framework provides a way to think about not only privacy law, but also …

Informed Trading And Cybersecurity Breaches, Joshua Mitts, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Cybersecurity has become a significant concern in corporate and commercial settings, and for good reason: a threatened or realized cybersecurity breach can materially affect firm value for capital investors. This paper explores whether market arbitrageurs appear systematically to exploit advance knowledge of such vulnerabilities. We make use of a novel data set tracking cybersecurity breach announcements among public companies to study trading patterns in the derivatives market preceding the announcement of a breach. Using a matched sample of unaffected control firms, we find significant trading abnormalities for hacked targets, measured in terms of both open interest and volume. Our results …

Right To Privacy, A Complicated Concept To Review, Ali Alibeigi, Abu Bakar Munir, Md Ershadul Karim

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The Concept and definition of the privacy has been changed during the time affecting by different factors. At the same time, the boundaries of privacy may differ from one place to another affecting by the culture, religion, etc. Nonetheless, there is not a unique general accepted definition for the privacy. Privacy has been considered from different disciplines like sociology, psychology, law and philosophy. It is a multidisciplinary domain, having an easy concept but difficult to define. However, by reviewing all different viewpoints, it can be concluded that privacy is an individual tendency, wish and natural need to be away from …

Dean's Desk: Iu Maurer Programs Supporting Careers In Cybersecurity, Austen L. Parrish

Austen Parrish (2014-2022)

A recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report estimated a near 30 percent growth in coming years for information security professionals, far outpacing most other job types. While Indiana University has long recognized the importance of data security and privacy, multiple new initiatives are ensuring that the next generation of chief information security officers, systems analysts, privacy professionals and others will come from our law school.

One of the ways the law school is leading the way is through the university’s new master of science in cybersecurity risk management. That degree program combines the resources of three of IU’s top-ranked schools …

Workplace Freakonomics, Matthew T. Bodie

All Faculty Scholarship

Data analytics has revolutionized our economy, and employment is no exception. Sometimes called people analytics or HR analytics, the study of worker behavior and activity now includes the collection of massive amounts of data that is then crunched by algorithms looking for both expected and unexpected patterns. This work is akin to the "freakonomics" approach, which asks unusual questions and is prepared to find answers that may upset conventional wisdom. This paper explores the possibility of a "workplace freakonomics" approach to using big data in the workplace, and considers the legal and ethical ramifications for wide-ranging explorations of employee data.

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 …

Spying Inc., Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

The latest spying craze is the “stalking app.” Once installed on someone’s cell phone, the stalking app provides continuous access to the person’s calls, texts, snap chats, photos, calendar updates, and movements. Domestic abusers and stalkers frequently turn to stalking apps because they are undetectable even to sophisticated phone owners.

Business is booming for stalking app providers, even though their entire enterprise is arguably illegal. Federal and state wiretapping laws ban the manufacture, sale, or advertisement of devices knowing their design makes them primarily useful for the surreptitious interception of electronic communications. But those laws are rarely, if ever, enforced. …

Outing Privacy, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

The government regularly outs information concerning people's sexuality, gender identity, and HIV status. Notwithstanding the implications of such outings, the Supreme Court has yet to resolve whether the Constitution contains a right to informational privacy - a right to limit the government's ability to collect and disseminate personal information.

This Article probes informational privacy theory and jurisprudence to better understand the judiciary's reluctance to fully embrace a constitutional right to informational privacy. The Article argues that while existing scholarly theories of informational privacy encourage us to broadly imagine the right and its possibilities, often focusing on informational privacy's ability to …

Network Accountability For The Domestic Intelligence Apparatus, Danielle K. Citron, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

A new domestic intelligence network has made vast amounts of data available to federal and state agencies and law enforcement officials. The network is anchored by “fusion centers,” novel sites of intergovernmental collaboration that generate and share intelligence and information. Several fusion centers have generated controversy for engaging in extraordinary measures that place citizens on watch lists, invade citizens’ privacy, and chill free expression. In addition to eroding civil liberties, fusion center overreach has resulted in wasted resources without concomitant gains in security.

While many scholars have assumed that this network represents a trade-off between security and civil liberties, our …

Fulfilling Government 2.0'S Promise With Robust Privacy Protections, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

The public can now “friend” the White House and scores of agencies on social networks, virtual worlds, and video-sharing sites. The Obama Administration sees this trend as crucial to enhancing governmental transparency, public participation, and collaboration. As the President has underscored, government needs to tap into the public’s expertise because it doesn’t have all of the answers.

To be sure, Government 2.0 might improve civic engagement. But it also might produce privacy vulnerabilities because agencies often gain access to individuals’ social network profiles, photographs, videos, and contact lists when interacting with individuals online. Little would prevent agencies from using and …

Visionary Pragmatism And The Value Of Privacy In The Twenty-First Century, Danielle K. Citron, Leslie Henry

Faculty Scholarship

Despite extensive scholarly, legislative, and judicial attention to privacy, our understanding of privacy and the interests it protects remains inadequate. At the crux of this problem is privacy’s protean nature: it means “so many different things to so many different people” that attempts to articulate just what it is, or why it is important, generally have failed or become unwieldy. As a result, important privacy problems remain unaddressed, often to society’s detriment.

In his newest book, Understanding Privacy, Daniel J. Solove aims to reverse this state of affairs with a pluralistic conception of privacy that recognizes the societal value of …

Understanding The New Virtualist Paradigm, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article discusses the central ideas within an emerging body of cyberlaw scholarship I have elsewhere called the "New Virtualism". We now know that the original "virtualists"- those first generation cyberlaw scholars who believed virtual worlds and spaces were immune to corporate and state control - were wrong; these days, such state and corporate interests are ubiquitous in cyberspace and the Internet. But is this it? Is there not anything else we can learn about cyberlaw from the virtualists and their utopian dreams? I think so. In fact, the New Virtualist paradigm of cyberlaw scholarship draws on the insights of …

Privacy And The New Virtualism, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

First generation cyberlaw scholars were deeply influenced by the uniqueness of cyberspace, and believed its technology and scope meant it could not be controlled by any government. Few still ascribe to this utopian vision. However, there is now a growing body of second generation cyberlaw scholarship that speaks not only to the differential character of cyberspace, but also analyzes legal norms within virtual spaces while drawing connections to our experience in real space. I call this the New Virtualism. Situated within this emerging scholarship, this article offers a new approach to privacy in virtual spaces by drawing on what Orin …

Human Identification Theory And The Identity Theft Problem, Lynn M. Lopucki

UF Law Faculty Publications

This paper builds on the theory of human identification proposed by Professor Roger Clarke and uses the product as the basis for a proposed solution to the identity theft problem. The expanded theory holds that all human identification fits a single model. The identifior matches the characteristics of a person observed in a first observation with the characteristics of a person observed in a second observation to determine whether they are the same person. From the theory it follows that a characteristic used for identification in the credit reporting system, such as social security number, mother's maiden name and date …