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Full-Text Articles in Law
Interview On The Black Box Society, Lawrence Joseph, Frank A. Pasquale
Interview On The Black Box Society, Lawrence Joseph, Frank A. Pasquale
Faculty Scholarship
Hidden algorithms drive decisions at major Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms. Thanks to automation, those firms can approve credit, rank websites, and make myriad other decisions instantaneously. But what are the costs of their methods? And what exactly are they doing with their digital profiles of us?
Leaks, whistleblowers, and legal disputes have shed new light on corporate surveillance and the automated judgments it enables. Self-serving and reckless behavior is surprisingly common, and easy to hide in code protected by legal and real secrecy. Even after billions of dollars of fines have been levied, underfunded regulators may have only …
Privacy, Antitrust, And Power, Frank Pasquale
Privacy, Antitrust, And Power, Frank Pasquale
Faculty Scholarship
When a dominant internet service collects information about its users, the situation is so far from the usual arm’s-length market transaction that neoclassical economic analysis is misleading. “Lack of surveillance” is not a product that individuals have varying preferences for and purchase accordingly. Rather, surveillance is an inevitable concomitant of life online. We need to tame the power that surveillance entails, rather than continuing to pursue illusory, surveillance-free alternatives on the platform level.
To the extent a company creates profiles of individuals and collects data on them, a third party ought to be collecting reports from the company on how …
Federal Search Commission? Access, Fairness, And Accountability In The Law Of Search, Oren Bracha, Frank Pasquale
Federal Search Commission? Access, Fairness, And Accountability In The Law Of Search, Oren Bracha, Frank Pasquale
Faculty Scholarship
Should search engines be subject to the types of regulation now applied to personal data collectors, cable networks, or phone books? In this article, we make the case for some regulation of the ability of search engines to manipulate and structure their results. We demonstrate that the First Amendment, properly understood, does not prohibit such regulation. Nor will such interventions inevitably lead to the disclosure of important trade secrets.
After setting forth normative foundations for evaluating search engine manipulation, we explain how neither market discipline nor technological advance is likely to stop it. Though savvy users and personalized search may …