Law Commons^™

Privacy Nicks: How The Law Normalizes Surveillance, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger, Johanna Gunawan

Faculty Scholarship

Privacy law is failing to protect individuals from being watched and exposed, despite stronger surveillance and data protection rules. The problem is that our rules look to social norms to set thresholds for privacy violations, but people can get used to being observed. In this article, we argue that by ignoring de minimis privacy encroachments, the law is complicit in normalizing surveillance. Privacy law helps acclimate people to being watched by ignoring smaller, more frequent, and more mundane privacy diminutions. We call these reductions “privacy nicks,” like the proverbial “thousand cuts” that lead to death.

Privacy nicks come from the …

Privacy And Property: Constitutional Concerns Of Dna Dragnet Testing, E. Wyatt Jones

Honors Projects

DNA dragnets have attracted both public and scholarly criticisms that have yet to be resolved by the Courts. This review will introduce a modern understanding of DNA analysis, a complete introduction to past and present Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, and existing suggestions concerning similar issues in legal scholarship. Considering these contexts, this review concludes that a focus on privacy and property at once, with a particular sensitivity to the inseverable relationship between the two interests, is Constitutionally consistent with precedent and the most workable means of answering the question at hand.

Standing Up To Hackers: Article Iii Standing For Victims Of Data Breaches, Kendall Coffey

University of Miami Law Review

Despite the increasing amount of data breaches, there is no liability for parties who do not adequately protect victim’s information. In federal court, plaintiffs must show that their injury was concrete, particularized, and imminent. But, when plaintiffs’ information has been stolen, but not yet criminally used, they may be unable to establish a right to relief. Victims face challenges when seeking damage for this future harm, because despite their destroyed privacy, they may not have evidence of a perpetrator’s actual misuse of purloined data. This Article analyzes multiple court decisions, generally in the setting of class-actions, and discusses outcomes of …

Adopting Social Media In Family And Adoption Law, Stacey B. Steinberg, Meredith Burgess, Karla Herrera

Utah Law Review

Social media has dramatically changed the landscape facing families brought together through adoption. Just as adoptive families thirty years ago could not have predicted the impact of DNA technology on postadoption family life, adoptive families are only now beginning to grasp the impact of social media connectivity on the lives of their growing children. This change is related both to social media’s impact on family life and to fundamental shifts in our understanding of privacy more generally. Understanding the legal rights of parents and children in these circumstances is a novel and underexplored area of family law, constitutional law, and …

The Data Trust Solution To Data Sharing Problems, Kimberly A. Houser, John W. Bagby

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

A small number of large companies hold most of the world’s data. Once in the hands of these companies, data subjects have little control over the use and sharing of their data. Additionally, this data is not generally available to small and medium enterprises or organizations who seek to use it for social good. A number of solutions have been proposed to limit Big Tech “power,” including antitrust actions and stricter privacy laws, but these measures are not likely to address both the oversharing and under-sharing of personal data. Although the data trust concept is being actively explored in the …

How Much Is Your Data Worth? Ccpa's Data Valuation Requirement Explored, Jeewon Kim Serrato

San Diego Law Review

On January 28, 2022, the Office of the Attorney General of the State of California (OAG or the California Attorney General) put businesses operating loyalty programs on notice for violations of the California Privacy Protection Act (CCPA). Immediately following this press release, the California Attorney General sent a number of Notice of Violation letters to businesses, which alleged that if a business is offering “discounts, free items, or other rewards, in exchange for personal information[, it] must provide consumers with a notice of financial incentive.” These letters were sent to “major corporations in the retail, home improvement, travel, and food …

“Alexa, Am I A Murderer?”: An Analysis Of Whether The First Amendment Protects Smart Speaker Communications, Josie A. Bates

Arkansas Law Review

State v. Bates poses interesting First Amendment questions that go far beyond the case itself, such as whether communications to and from smart speakers are protected under the First Amendment and, if so, whether the government must therefore meet a heightened standard before obtaining information from these devices. But currently, there are no definite answers. Thus, this analysis will attempt to answer these questions as well as offer general guidance for the future of First and Fourth Amendment law in the age of ever-changing technological advancements and never-ending criminal accusations.

Perlindungan Atas Privasi Konsumen Dalam Layanan Reservasi Tiket Online Dari Pt. Kereta Api Indonesia, Aprilia Susanti

"Dharmasisya” Jurnal Program Magister Hukum FHUI

The significant increase in online activities cannot be separated from the many active internet users who use mobile internet connections to carry out their daily activities, one of which is for the convenience of making ticket reservations at PT. Indonesian Railways (KAI). The purpose of this research is to find out the study of the business law of protecting consumer privacy in the online ticketing service of PT. KAI. Data collection was carried out by means of a literature study of the relationship between laws and regulations in consumer protection and the position of PT. KAI as business actors and …

Hired By A Machine: Can A New York City Law Enforce Algorithmic Fairness In Hiring Practices?, Lindsey Fuchs

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

Workplace antidiscrimination laws must adapt to address today’s technological realities. If left underregulated, the rapidly expanding role of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) in hiring practices has the danger of creating new, more obscure modes of discrimination. Companies use these tools to reduce the duration and costs of hiring and potentially attract a larger pool of qualified applicants for their open positions. But how can we guarantee that these hiring tools yield fair outcomes when deployed? These issues are just starting to be addressed at the federal, state, and city levels. This Note tackles whether a new city law can be improved …

The Carpenter Test As A Transformation Of Fourth Amendment Law, Matthew Tokson

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

For over fifty years, the Fourth Amendment’s scope has been largely dictated by the Katz test, which applies the Amendment’s protections only when the government has violated a person’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.” This vague standard is one of the most criticized doctrines in all of American law, and its lack of coherence has made Fourth Amendment search law notoriously confusing. Things have become even more complex following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Carpenter v. United States, which has spawned its own alternative test for determining the Fourth Amendment’s scope. The emerging Carpenter test looks to the revealing nature …

Questions Of Intellectual Property And Fundamental Values In The Digital Age, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Today's intellectual property debates, in both law and the larger society, are a bellwether of changing justice needs in the twenty-first century. As the digital age democratizes technological opportunities, it brings intellectual property law into mainstream everyday culture. This generates debates about the relationship between the constitutional interest in "the progress of science and useful arts" and other fundamental values, such as equality, privacy, and distributive justice. These values, which were not explicitly part of intellectual property regimes in prior eras, are especially challenged in today's internet world.

The article (which was presented as the annual Nies Lecture in April …

Governing Smart Cities As Knowledge Commons - Introduction, Chapter 1 & Conclusion, Brett M. Frischmann, Michael J. Madison, Madelyn Sanfilippo

Book Chapters

Smart city technology has its value and its place; it isn’t automatically or universally harmful. Urban challenges and opportunities addressed via smart technology demand systematic study, examining general patterns and local variations as smart city practices unfold around the world. Smart cities are complex blends of community governance institutions, social dilemmas that cities face, and dynamic relationships among information and data, technology, and human lives. Some of those blends are more typical and common. Some are more nuanced in specific contexts. This volume uses the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework to sort out relevant and important distinctions. The framework grounds …

Commentary On Reynolds V. Mcnichols, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

The 1973 case Reynolds v McNichols concerns a woman who was repeatedly arrested on suspicion of and for “prostitution.” During these arrests, Roxanne Reynolds, the defendant, was subject to forced examination and treatment. The arrests and examinations were authorized by Section 735 of the Revised Municipal Code of the City and County of Denver, which directed the Department of Health and Hospitals “to use every available means to ascertain the existence of and investigate all suspected cases of communicable venereal disease, and to determine the sources of such infections.” Reynolds argued that the ordinance was unconstitutional because it was irrational, …

Sunshine Laws Behind The Clouds: Limited Transparency In A Time Of National Emergency, Ira P. Robbins

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically changed the way citizens lived their lives, businesses operated, and governments functioned. With most people forced to stay home, the pandemic also disrupted how people received their news and other essential information. Public records and public meetings had to adapt to face the growing challenges in a locked-down world. While some governmental bodies were able to keep up with the threat that COVID-19 posed against transparency, others either failed to acclimate to the new normal or actively took advantage of the circumstances to limit how much the public knew not only about the crisis, but about …

Transcript: Presentation On Artificial Intelligence And Discrimination In Healthcare, Sharona Hoffman

Journal of Law and Health

The following is a transcription from The Digital Health and Technology Symposium presented at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law by The Journal of Law & Health on Friday, April 8, 2022. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Privacy Please — Direct Observation Drug Testing & Invasion Of Privacy, Elizabeth Black

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Big Data, Big Gap: Working Towards A Hipaa Framework That Covers Big Data, Ryan Mueller

Indiana Law Journal

One lasting impact of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the privacy protections it provides for our sensitive health information. In the era of Big Data, however, much of our health information exists outside the traditional doctor-patient dynamic. From wearable technology, to mobile applications, to social media and internet browsing, Big Data organizations collect swaths of data that shed light on sensitive health information. Big Data organizations largely fall outside of HIPAA’s current framework because of the stringent requirements for when the HIPAA protections apply, namely that the data must be held by a covered entity, and …

Content Moderation As Surveillance, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Technology platforms are the new governments, and content moderation is the new law, or so goes a common refrain. As platforms increasingly turn toward new, automated mechanisms of enforcing their rules, the apparent power of the private sector seems only to grow. Yet beneath the surface lies a web of complex relationships between public and private authorities that call into question whether platforms truly possess such unilateral power. Law enforcement and police are exerting influence over platform content rules, giving governments a louder voice in supposedly “private” decisions. At the same time, law enforcement avails itself of the affordances of …

Good Intentions Gone Awry: Privacy As Proportionality Under Rule 26(B)(1), Hon. James C. Francis Iv (Ret.)

San Diego Law Review

Over the past several years, two legal trends have gained momentum. The first is the effort to make discovery in litigation more proportional, culminating in the 2015 amendment to Rule 26(b)(1) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which includes proportionality in the definition of what information is discoverable. The second is the movement, both in the United States and abroad, toward the greater recognition of individual privacy interests. Some courts and commentators now seek to merge these two trends by advocating that privacy should be considered a factor in analyzing proportionality under Rule 26(b)(1).

This paper takes the position …

The Central Monitoring System And Privacy: Analysing What We Know So Far, Jaideep Reddy

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

State-run surveillance is as old as the ages, but the wired state of our lives has put it in the spotlight more now than perhaps ever before. Our communication and data can often be veritable repositories of all that we are, and many governments today have the technological means to give them relatively easy access to most of our private data. Civil society around the world has therefore naturally expressed concern over the increasing scope of State surveillance. The Central Monitoring System (hereafter, “CMS”) is a new technology for State surveillance in India, and is in the nascent stages of …

Ip Addresses And Expeditious Disclosure Of Identity In India, Prashant Iyengar

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

Concomitant with the proliferation of cybercrime in India has been the use of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses by law enforcement agencies to track down criminals. While useful in many situations, the potential for misuse of this information raises important concerns for the privacy of individuals online. This note reviews the statutory mechanisms regulating the retention and disclosure of IP addresses by internet companies in India. It identifies and analyses the four broad sources to which the regime of IP Address disclosure by Internet Service Providers (ISP) may be traced: under the (i) operating licenses issued under the Telegrah Act, 1885, …

Policy-Making, Technology And Privacy In India, Subhajit Basu

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

There is a preconceived assumption that privacy laws in India are notoriously weak. This unquestioned assumption is based on a paradigm that does not take into consideration that the conception of privacy in India is influenced by its ‘culture of trust.’ Unfortunately, rather than looking into the specific societal, political and economic factors triggering the controversy, privacy researchers in the West have constantly varied the meaning and extent of the ‘right to privacy’ to bolster their argument. This article offers an explanation for why ‘umbrella’ data privacy legislation similar to the E.U. Data Protection Directive should not be enacted by …

Balancing Online Privacy In India, Apar Gupta

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

There have been disturbing press reports and articles on the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008. These accounts broadly wallow about the increase in the police powers of the state. They contend that the amendment grants legal sanction to online surveillance inexorably whittling down internet privacy. This article seeks to examine this prevalent notion. It discovers that legal provisions for online surveillance, monitoring and identification of data have been inserted in a narrow and defined class of circumstances governed by tenuous procedures. At first glance it may seem that these procedures and safeguards by themselves increase the right to privacy. However, …

Data Protection Efforts In India: Blind Leading The Blind?, Latha R Nair

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

This paper, after establishing the need for effective data protection in India, goes on to describe the rudimentary measures taken in the country till date in the sphere of data protection. While highlighting the inadequacy of such measures and the ambiguity in proposed amendments, the author seeks inspiration from European Union law in proposing a broad framework for data protection law in India.

Patenting Human Genes: Wherein Lies The Balance Between Private Rights And Public Access In India And The United States?, Elizabeth Siew-Kuan Ng

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

This article examines the patentability of human genes by evaluating where the balance should lie between the protection of private rights and public access for the promotion of further innovation and public health. The author investigates this issue by providing a comparative study on the approaches adopted in India and the United States – two highly divergent nations that offer unique contrasts in a comparative analysis of their patent regimes. The outcome of the appraisal discerns a potential convergence in the Indian and US approaches on certain aspects of human gene patent-eligibility. This interesting result reveals that contrary to intuition, …

The Internet Of Citizens: A Lawyer’S View On Some Technological Developments In The United Kingdom And India*, Guido Noto La Diega

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

This article aspires to constitute a useful tool for both Asian and European readers as regards some of the state-of-the-art technologies revolving around the Internet of Things (‘IoT’) and their intersection with cloud computing (the Clouds of Things, ‘CoT’) in both the continents. The main emerging legal issues will be presented, with a focus on intellectual property, consumer protection, and privacy. The cases chosen are from India and the United Kingdom, two countries that are conspicuously active on this front. I will give an account only of (what I consider to be) the highlights of the IoT in India and …

Flattening The Curve While Protecting Our Right To Privacy: How The United States Can Implement The Digital Contract Tracing Efforts Used In East Asia, Evan Morris

The Global Business Law Review

This paper looks at the digital contact tracing efforts implemented by other nations and assesses how similar measures could operate under enacted and proposed United States laws. Part I overviews the history of contact tracing and its effectiveness in prior disease outbreaks. Part II delves into the digital contact tracing efforts implemented by South Korea and Singapore. These summaries include: the digital contact tracing efforts taken, the laws that authorize these efforts, the public’s reception, and the overall effectiveness of the efforts. Part III overviews the digital contact tracing efforts in the United States, including proposed legislation aimed at user …

Throwing Stones In Glass Houses: Protecting Privacy Under The Law Of Nuisance, Cheng Lim Saw, Joon Wei Aaron Yoong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The limits of the law of nuisance were recently tested in the controversial decisions of Fearn v Tate Gallery Board of Trustees, both before the UK High Court and UK Court of Appeal. Against the backdrop of these decisions, this article argues that the tort of private nuisance can indeed, in appropriate cases, protect against invasions of privacy caused by overlooking – all within the present framework and ambit of the action. It is also proposed that a communitarian approach be adopted in fashioning the appropriate remedy for actions founded in nuisance.

The End Of Roe V Wade And New Legal Frontiers On The Constitutional Right To Abortion, I. Glenn Cohen, Melissa Murray, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

On June 24, 2002, the US Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Court’s majority decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito was substantially the same as a draft opinion leaked a month earlier. The regulation of abortion will now be decided by the states, with about half currently or will soon ban or severely restrict abortion access. In this Viewpoint, we explain the Dobbs ruling and what it means for physicians, public health, and society.

We focus on new legal frontiers in the constitutional right to abortion, including medication abortion …

Regulating Harm: Tensions Between Data Privacy And Data Transparency, Kaitlyn Filip, Kat Albrecht

CJC Publications

In an era of massive digital data growth, data storage and dissemination has posed complex new problems for privacy regulations across agencies and institutions on a global scale. Laws about data privacy vary substantially by country, by state, and by industry. In formulating these policies, there exists a fundamental tension between a desire for data privacy and one for data transparency. This tension becomes particularly acute as new digital tools and access technologies have made these records more accessible and connectable than ever before. This tension is borne out in the enactment of law. Three states – California, Colorado, and …