Law Commons^™

The Left's Law-And-Order Agenda, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Right To Explanation, Explained, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

Many have called for algorithmic accountability: laws governing decision-making by complex algorithms, or AI. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) now establishes exactly this. The recent debate over the right to explanation (a right to information about individual decisions made by algorithms) has obscured the significant algorithmic accountability regime established by the GDPR. The GDPR’s provisions on algorithmic accountability, which include a right to explanation, have the potential to be broader, stronger, and deeper than the preceding requirements of the Data Protection Directive. This Essay clarifies, largely for a U.S. audience, what the GDPR actually requires, incorporating recently released …

Binary Governance: Lessons From The Gdpr’S Approach To Algorithmic Accountability, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

Algorithms are now used to make significant decisions about individuals, from credit determinations to hiring and firing. But they are largely unregulated under U.S. law. A quickly growing literature has split on how to address algorithmic decision-making, with individual rights and accountability to nonexpert stakeholders and to the public at the crux of the debate. In this Article, I make the case for why both individual rights and public- and stakeholder-facing accountability are not just goods in and of themselves but crucial components of effective governance. Only individual rights can fully address dignitary and justificatory concerns behind calls for regulating …

Keeping It Off The Record: Student Social Media Monitoring And The Need For Updated Student Records Laws, Alice Haston

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

An increasing number of school districts work with private companies to monitor public social media and to notify administrators of alarming student information. Although these services help address challenging school safety issues, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and state law offer little guidance on how districts should store student social media data. This Note encourages states to pass student records laws similar to recent California legislation and urges the Department of Education to clarify the relationship between student social media and education records under FERPA. New state and federal initiatives would help ensure that third parties may …

Infracompetitive Privacy, Greg Day, Abbey R. Stemler

Scholarly Works

One of the chief anticompetitive effects of modern business lies in antitrust’s blind spot. Platform-based companies (“platforms”) have innovated a business model whereby they offer consumers “free" and low-priced services in exchange for their personal information. With this data, platforms can design products, target consumers, and sell such information to third parties. The problem is that platforms can inflict greater costs on users and markets in the form of lost privacy than efficiencies generated from their low prices. Consumers, as examples, spend billions of dollars annually to remedy privacy breaches and, alarmingly, participate unwittingly in experiments designed to manipulate their …

The Exclusionary Rule In The Age Of Blue Data, Andrew Ferguson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

In Herring v. United States, Chief Justice John Roberts reframed the Supreme Court’s understanding of the exclusionary rule: “As laid out in our cases, the exclusionary rule serves to deter deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring or systemic negligence.” The open question remains: how can defendants demonstrate sufficient recurring or systemic negligence to warrant exclusion? The Supreme Court has never answered the question, although the absence of systemic or recurring problems has figured prominently in two recent exclusionary rule decisions. Without the ability to document recurring failures, or patterns of police misconduct, courts can dismiss …

Privacy And Security Across Borders, Jennifer Daskal

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Three recent initiatives -by the United States, European Union, and Australiaare opening salvos in what will likely be an ongoing and critically important debate about law enforcement access to data, the jurisdictional limits to such access, and the rules that apply. Each of these developments addresses a common set of challenges posed by the increased digitalization of information, the rising power of private companies delimiting access to that information, and the cross-border nature of investigations that involve digital evidence. And each has profound implications for privacy, security, and the possibility of meaningful democratic accountability and control. This Essay analyzes the …

Power, Process, And Automated Decision-Making, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

Many decisions that used to be made by humans are now made by machines. And yet, automated decision-making systems based on “big data” – powered algorithms and machine learning are just as prone to mistakes, biases, and arbitrariness as their human counterparts. The result is a technologically driven decision-making process that seems to defy interrogation, analysis, and accountability and, therefore, undermines due process. This should make algorithmic decision-making an illegitimate source of authority in a liberal democracy. This Essay argues that algorithmic decision-making is a product of the neoliberal project to undermine social values like equality, nondiscrimination, and human flourishing …

Copyright’S Memory Hole, Eric Goldman, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

There is growing interest in using copyright to protect the privacy and reputation of people depicted in copyrighted works. This pressure is driven by heightened concerns about privacy and reputation on the Internet, plus copyright’s plaintiff-favorable attributes compared to traditional privacy and reputation torts.
/="/">
/="/">The Constitution authorizes copyright law because its exclusive rights benefit society by increasing our knowledge. Counterproductively, to advance privacy and reputation interests, copyright law is being misdeployed to suppress socially valuable works. This results in “memory holes” in society’s knowledge, analogous to those discussed in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
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/="/">By referencing …

The Inconsentability Of Facial Surveillance, Evan Selinger, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Governments and companies often use consent to justify the use of facial recognition technologies for surveillance. Many proposals for regulating facial recognition technology incorporate consent rules as a way to protect those faces that are being tagged and tracked. But consent is a broken regulatory mechanism for facial surveillance. The individual risks of facial surveillance are impossibly opaque, and our collective autonomy and obscurity interests aren’t captured or served by individual decisions.

In this article, we argue that facial recognition technologies have a massive and likely fatal consent problem. We reconstruct some of Nancy Kim’s fundamental claims in Consentability: Consent …

The Pathologies Of Digital Consent, Neil M. Richards, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Consent permeates both our law and our lives — especially in the digital context. Consent is the foundation of the relationships we have with search engines, social networks, commercial web sites, and any one of the dozens of other digitally mediated businesses we interact with regularly. We are frequently asked to consent to terms of service, privacy notices, the use of cookies, and so many other commercial practices. Consent is important, but it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. As a number of scholars have documented, while consent models permeate the digital consumer landscape, the practical conditions …

Functional Equivalence And Residual Rights Post-Carpenter: Framing A Test Consistent With Precedent And Original Meaning, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Carpenter Court held that warrantless access to seven or more days of cell site location information (CSLI) constitutes a violation of the reasonable expectation of privacy that individuals have in the whole of their physical movements. But the grounds on which the Court drew a line characterize all sorts of digital records—including those at issue in Miller and Smith, belying the majority’s claim that the decision leaves third-party doctrine intact. Instead of avoiding Katz’s pitfalls, moreover, the Court emphasized voluntary assumption of risk, doubling down on the subjective nature of judicial determination. The decision will likely lead to …

Turning Privacy Inside Out, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The problem of theorizing privacy moves on two levels, the first consisting of an inadequate conceptual vocabulary and the second consisting of an inadequate institutional grammar. Privacy rights are supposed to protect individual subjects, and so conventional ways of understanding privacy are subject-centered, but subject-centered approaches to theorizing privacy also wrestle with deeply embedded contradictions. And privacy’s most enduring institutional failure modes flow from its insistence on placing the individual and individualized control at the center. Strategies for rescuing privacy from irrelevance involve inverting both established ways of talking about privacy rights and established conventions for designing institutions to protect …

How To Get Away With Murder: The “Gay Panic” Defense, Omar T. Russo

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

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 …

Maps: Scaling Privacy Compliance Analysis To A Million Apps, Sebastian Zimmeck, Peter Story, Daniel Smullen, Abhilasha Ravichander, Ziqi Wang, Joel R. Reidenberg, N. Cameron Russell, Norman Sadeh

Faculty Scholarship

The app economy is largely reliant on data collection as its primary revenue model. To comply with legal requirements, app developers are often obligated to notify users of their privacy practices in privacy policies. However, prior research has suggested that many developers are not accurately disclosing their apps’ privacy practices. Evaluating discrepancies between apps’ code and privacy policies enables the identification of potential compliance issues. In this study, we introduce the Mobile App Privacy System (MAPS) for conducting an extensive privacy census of Android apps. We designed a pipeline for retrieving and analyzing large app populations based on code analysis …

Apis And Your Privacy, N. Cameron Russell

Faculty Scholarship

Application programming interfaces, or APIs, have been the topic of much recent discussion. Newsworthy events, including those involving Facebook’s API and Cambridge Analytica obtaining information about millions of Facebook users, have highlighted the technical capabilities of APIs for prominent websites and mobile applications. At the same time, media coverage of ways that APIs have been misused has sparked concern for potential privacy invasions and other issues of public policy. This paper seeks to educate consumers on how APIs work and how they are used within popular websites and mobile apps to gather, share, and utilize data.

APIs are used in …

A Skeptical View Of Information Fiduciaries, Lina M. Khan, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

The concept of “information fiduciaries” has surged to the forefront of debates on online-platform regulation. Developed by Professor Jack Balkin, the concept is meant to rebalance the relationship between ordinary individuals and the digital companies that accumulate, analyze, and sell their personal data for profit. Just as the law imposes special duties of care, confidentiality, and loyalty on doctors, lawyers, and accountants vis-à-vis their patients and clients, Balkin argues, so too should it impose special duties on corporations such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter vis-à-vis their end users. Over the past several years, this argument has garnered remarkably broad support …

Evolving Autonomous Vehicle Technology And The Erosion Of Privacy, Raquel Toral

University of Miami Business Law Review

No abstract provided.

Privacy's Double Standards: Public Disclosure Tort Case Chart (2006-2016), Scott Skinner-Thompson

Research Data

This document, Privacy's Double Standards: Public Disclosure Tort Case Chart (2006-2016), 93 Wash. L. Rev. Online 2051 (2018), https://www.law.uw.edu/wlr/online-edition/scott-skinner-thompson, was published as an electronic supplement to the empirical study, Scott Skinner-Thompson, Privacy’s Double Standards, 93 Wash. L. Rev. 2051 (2018), available at https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/articles/1218/.

Privacy Spaces, Bert-Jaap Koops

West Virginia Law Review

Privacy literature contains conceptualizations of privacy in relation to role-playing and identity construction, and in relation to access control and boundary-management. In this paper, I combine both strands to introduce the concept of privacy spaces: spaces in which you can play, in your own way, the relevant role(s) you have in social life. Drawing from privacy conceptions in legal scholarship, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, human geography, and psychology, a systematic overview of traditional privacy spaces is offered, including mental bubbles, the body, personal space, personal writings, the home, private conversation space, cars, stalls, intimacy bubbles, professional black boxes, coffee house spaces, …

The First Amendment In The Second Gilded Age, Jack M. Balkin

Buffalo Law Review

How do we pay for the digital public sphere? In the Second Gilded Age, the answer is primarily through digital surveillance and through finding ever new ways to make money out of personal data. Digital capitalism in the Second Gilded Age features an implicit bargain: a seemingly unlimited freedom to speak in exchange for the right to surveil and manipulate end users.To protect freedom of speech in the Second Gilded Age we must distinguish the values of free speech from the judicially created doctrines of the First Amendment. That is because the practical freedom to speak online depends on a …

Better Late Than Never: Bringing The Data Security Regulatory Environment Into The Modern Era, Jacob Holden

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Tactful Inattention: Erving Goffman, Privacy In The Digital Age, And The Virtue Of Averting One's Eyes, Elizabeth De Armond

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

This Article suggests that we would benefit if we would protect privacy by sometimes requiring tactful inattention by potential users rather than total secrecy by the target. That is, some legal privacy protections should stop emphasizing secrecy and instead emphasize the appropriate uses of personally identifiable and often sensitive information by gelling tactful inattention into legal standards. Culturally, such an expansion may be difficult, as we tend to a “finders-keepers” attitude towards data. However, given technology’s ability to dissolve routine barriers, if we require others to leave some information out of some equations, we may be able to retain …

Property, Persons, And Institutionalized Police Interdiction In Byrd V. United States, Eric J. Miller

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

During a fairly routine traffic stop of a motorist driving a rental car, two State Troopers in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, discovered that the driver, Terrence Byrd, was not the listed renter. The Court ruled that Byrd nonetheless retained a Fourth Amendment right to object to the search. The Court did not address, however, why the Troopers stopped Byrd in the first place. A close examination of the case filings reveal suggests that Byrd was stopped on the basis of his race. The racial feature ofthe stop is obscured by the Court’s current property-basedinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment’s right to privacy.

Although …

Revenge Porn, Thomas Lonardo, Tricia P. Martland, Rhode Island Bar Journal

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Common Sense: Rethinking The New Common Rule's Week Protections For Human Subjects, Ahsin Azim

Vanderbilt Law Review

Since 1991, the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, known as the "Common Rule," has protected the identifiable private information of human subjects who participate in federally funded research initiatives. Although the research landscape has drastically changed since 1991, the Common Rule has remained mostly unchanged since its promulgation. In an effort to modernize the Common Rule, the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects Final Rule ("Final Rule') was published on January 19, 2017. The Final Rule, however, decreases human-subject protections by increasing access to identifiable data with limited administrative oversight. Accordingly, the Final Rule demands …

Genderfucking Non-Disclosure: Sexual Fraud, Transgender Bodies, And Messy Identities, Florence Ashley

Dalhousie Law Journal

If I don't tell you that I was assigned male at birth, as a transgender person, can I go to jail for sexual assault by fraud? In some jurisdictionslike England or Israel, the answer is: yes. Previous arguments against this criminalisation have focused on the realness of trans people's genders: since trans men are men and trans women are women, it is not misleading for them to present as they do. Highlighting the limitationsofthis position, which doesn't fully account for the messiness ofgendered experiences, the author puts forward an argument against the criminalisation of (trans)gender history non-disclosure rooted in privacy. …

Trafficking Technology: A Look At Different Approaches To Ending Technology-Facilitated Human Trafficking, David Barney

Pepperdine Law Review

In 2018, many believe that slavery is an antiquated concept. But as with anything else, if it has not become extinct, it has evolved with time. Human trafficking is no different. Each year, millions of men, women and children are trafficked in the United States, and internationally, and forced to work against their will. Through the rise of technology and an increasingly globalized world, traffickers have learned to use technology as a tool to help facilitate the trafficking of persons and to sell those victims to others they never could have reached before. But what are we doing about it? …

Mining For Children’S Data In Today’S Digital World, Damin Park

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.