Computer Law Commons^™

Information Law Pluralism, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Information-intensive activities are reshaping political, social, and economic institutions. As they respond to these shifts, legislators and regulators are embracing information as a regulatory device for tech. Far from limiting themselves to public disclosure, consumer notice, and other traditional mechanisms of fostering transparency and information flows, however, legislators are using other, more nuanced tools to incentivize regulated entities to obtain, generate, and share information.

This Article maps the landscape of the emerging information-based regimes for regulating tech and assesses their conceptual and practical implications. It canvasses an extensive set of recently enacted laws regulating the information economy and shows that, …

Against Ai Half Measures, Woodrow Hartzog, Neil Richards, Ryan Durrie, Jordan Francis

Faculty Scholarship

So far, U.S. consumer protection policy for artificial intelligence (AI) accountability has largely consisted of industry-led approaches such as encouraging transparency, mitigating bias, promoting principles of ethics, and empowering people. These approaches are vital, but they are only half measures. To bring AI within the rule of law, lawmakers must start drawing substantive lines.

In this Article, we identify four AI regulatory approaches to consumer, data, and democratic harms as half measures. First, transparency does not produce accountability on its own. Second, while mitigating bias in AI systems is critical, even unbiased systems are a threat to the vulnerable. Third, …

The Gamification Of Banking, Colleen Baker, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

Gamification is coming to banking. This phenomenon is already gain-ing ground in advertising, healthcare, manufacturing, and, more recently, with the GameStop and AMC meme stock saga in securities trading. The idea behind gamification is to make transactions seem fun, playful, and even casino-like in order to elicit habit-forming, addictive-like effects with consumers. This Article argues that the rise of financial technology (“fintech”) firms and their ever-growing business relationships with incumbent financial institutions has created the necessary conditions for gamification to take hold in the banking sector. In order to explore this observation, we undertake a study of current examples of …

Guide To Sec And Business Open Source Corporate Intelligence, Lawrence J. Trautman, Brian Elzweig, Neal F. Newman

Faculty Scholarship

An agency of the U.S. intelligence community observes, "The explosion of open source intelligence (OSINT) in recent years has transformed how governments and people around the world consume and process information about society and global issues." It is likely that "We all use open-source and probably don't even realize it, but we also use it for different reasons. You might use open-source information to do a credibility check and to find out more about the person selling you something on Facebook marketplace." Others "may research someone… met on a dating app or before hiring someone for a job." Every use …

Keynote Address: The Movement To Protect Kids From Addictive Technologies, Gaia Bernstein

Seattle University Law Review

In this keynote address, I describe my personal journey starting with a school outreach program I created in 2017 to address technology overuse among kids. While I initially advocated for self-help methods, I grew to recognize that the tech industry bore responsibility. This realization led me to write Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies, which focused on collective action to pressure the tech industry to redesign its addictive products.

I then describe the movement to control addictive technologies and protect kids, which has gained momentum since the end of the pandemic. This movement combines grassroots parent activism with legal-political action. …

Responding To Digital Addiction, Ned Snow

Seattle University Law Review

In Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies, Professor Gaia Bernstein calls our attention to the growing problem of digital addiction. Digital addiction may sound like something out of a science-fiction novel or something that does not raise the same sort of real-life practical concerns as are present in a physical health crisis or an economic decline. But as Bernstein presents the evidence, we learn that the consequences of digital addiction can be just as harmful as a serious disease or a financial depression. Cognitive development disorders, anxiety, emotional depression, social isolation, and other mental health ills can be debilitating—as much …

Target(Ed) Advertising, Derek E. Bambauer

UF Law Faculty Publications

Targeted advertising—using data about consumers to customize the ads they receive—is deeply controversial. It also creates a regulatory quandary. Targeted ads generate more money than untargeted ones for apps and online platforms. Apps and platforms depend on this revenue stream to offer free services to users, if not for their financial viability altogether. However, targeted advertising also generates significant privacy risks and consumer resentment. Despite sustained attention to this issue, neither legal scholars nor policymakers have crafted interventions that address both concerns, and existing regulatory regimes for targeted advertising have critical gaps.

This Article makes three key contributions to the …

Fair-Enough Ai, Jane R. Bambauer, Tal Z. Zarsky

UF Law Faculty Publications

AI is unfair. It can be inaccurate (in several ways), biased (in several ways, and to several groups), disproportionate, exploitable, and opaque. The policy world is awash in AI-governance frameworks, ethical guidelines, and other policy documents, but these lack concrete standards and provide little guidance on how to select between competing versions of (un)fairness. In other words, they abdicate the responsibility of setting priorities among values. At the same time, many of the policy documents harshly criticize AI and algorithmic tools for deficiencies in some particular aspect of fairness without considering whether alternative designs that fix the problem would make …

Facial Recognition Technology And The First Amendment, Joseph A. Tomain

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The growing ubiquity of facial recognition technology (FRT) is a problem. While much has been written on harmful government use of FRT, little has been written regarding harmful private actor use. This Article helps fill a gap in the literature by providing a detailed analysis of the First Amendment interests at stake when private actors use FRT. Specifically, this Article analyzes whether laws that limit the use of publicly available photographs to create faceprints for inclusion in FRT databases violate the First Amendment rights of private actors.

In May 2025, a multidistrict litigation against Clearview AI, an FRT company, offered …

Unto The (Data) Breach, Charlotte A. Tschider

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Since the early 2000s, U.S. courts have begun hearing “data breach” liability cases, the inevitable result of a growing internet-connected technology infrastructure. The relatively recent development of case law signals a body of law in development, stunted by significant limiting factors that prevent the coalescence of legal principles. To date, no holistic empirical exploration of data breach cases has offered sufficient detail to explore these factors. This descriptive empirical study analyzes, in detail, 225 data breach cases from 2005–2022, reviewing these cases over an extended period to descriptively identify key trends and changes within a bona fide data breach case’s …

Internet Search Engines’ Privacy Violations And The Lack Of Federal Regulation To Protect Consumers Rights, Elsa M. G. Rodriguez Ogando

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The United States’ current legal framework regarding internet search engines is disadvantageous to consumers. Federal privacy laws (although not encompassing search engines) grant businesses a strong legal basis in privacy claims and alibies for arbitrary behavior; these laws favor businesses over consumers. Moreover, state privacy laws empower nonspecific agencies to oversee privacy matters and enforce consumers’ rights. Thus, the U.S. privacy legal framework is in need of a new federal law that establishes consumers’ rights, as well as a federal agency dedicated solely to privacy matters. This Article proposes a federal law recommendation based on the standards of the California …

Gig Work At What Cost? Exploring Privacy Risks Of Gig Work Platform Participation In The U.S., Amogh Pradeep, Johanna Gunawan, Álvaro Feal, Woodrow Hartzog, David Choffnes

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, "gig work" platforms have gained popularity as a way for individuals to earn money; as of 2021, 16% of Americans have at some point earned money from such platforms. Despite their popularity and their history of unfair data collection practices and worker safety, little is known about the data collected from workers (and users) by gig platforms and about the privacy dark pattern designs present in their apps.

This paper presents an empirical measurement of 16 gig work platforms' data practices in the U.S. We analyze what data is collected by these platforms, and how it is …

Normalizing Facial Recognition Technology And The End Of Obscurity, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger, Judy Hyojoo Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that facial recognition technology is the most dangerous surveillance tool ever invented. Given the unique threats this morally suspect tool poses to privacy, civil liberties, human flourishing, and democracy, the only appropriate response is a ban. To justify our position, we explain why facial recognition is distinctive among biometrics, clarify how even seemingly benign and positive uses of the technology can trigger dangerous normalization dynamics, and pinpoint why current United States laws (with reverberations in the EU’s AI Act) are designed to accelerate a slippery slope that makes mass surveillance nearly inevitable. Our most fundamental contribution lies …

Ai Ethics, Law, And Policy, Pauline Kim, Ryan Durrie

Scholarship@WashULaw

AI technologies promise many benefits, but they can also have significant negative impacts on human health, safety, well-being, and fundamental rights. This chapter explores the different governance tools that have been considered for guiding developments in AI in socially beneficial ways, examining the relevance of ethics, law, and policy. Each of these approaches offer tools to address these concerns; however, each has limitations, and none provides a complete solution in itself. Statements of ethical principles can articulate high-level values and goals to guide behavior but are usually quite vague and difficult to operationalize. They also lack any enforcement mechanism. In …

The Outer Limits Of Digital Privacy Protections: A Review Of The Privacy Fallacy, Michael Conklin

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

No abstract provided.

Facing Up To The Risks Of Automated Facial-Recognition Technologies In Indian Law Enforcement, Ameen Jauhar

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

Within the larger discourse of risk mitigation of emerging technologies, the ever-expanding deployment of automated facial recognition technology (‘AFRT’) has garnered much skepticism. In India too, there has been a reported rise of states and law enforcement officials enthusiastically resorting to the use of AFRT.

The author will first delve into some of the controversial risks associated with AFRT, analysing them through the lens of Article 21 and the principle of due process under the Indian Constitution. The paper will then identify some of the regulatory solutions that are currently part of the discourse on minimising risks of AFRT and …

Taxation Of Information And The Data Revolution, Yariv Brauner

UF Law Faculty Publications

Existing and universal income tax rules are inherently incompatible with an economy in which information-based transactions play a significant role. This Article contends that income taxation is incapable of taxing information effectively. It goes on to argue that this incapability currently necessitates reform, and it offers three viable paths to such reform: consumption taxation, data taxes, and formulary taxation. The Article concludes that formulary taxation is currently the most desirable and plausible path to effective reform, owing to its promise to best stabilize and maintain the legitimacy of the international tax regime.

Filtered Dragnets And The Anti-Authoritarian Fourth Amendment, Jane R. Bambauer

UF Law Faculty Publications

Filtered dragnets are digital searches that identify a suspect based on the details of a crime. They can be designed to withhold information from law enforcement unless and until there is a very high probability that the individual has committed the offense. Examples today include DNA matching, facial recognition from photographs or video of a crime, automated child sexual abuse material detection, and reverse geolocation (geofence) searches. More are sure to come, and their wide-scale use will be irresistible to improve the low rates of criminal detection that currently afflict many communities.

However, filtered dragnets imperil society precisely because they …

How To Get The Property Out Of Privacy Law, Jane R. Bambauer

UF Law Faculty Publications

For the last ten years, American rhetoric and state lawmaking has attempted to provide consumers with greater and stickier property interest in their personal information. But the impracticalities of the sticky property model are becoming evident, and will be impossible to ignore as AI becomes more prevalent and useful. This Article critiques the property framework in privacy law, and explains how a risk-based approach can be modernized and implemented instead. An enduring system of privacy laws will manage risks rather than bestowing rights to control and delete information. To do this, data practices should be categorized into safe harbor practices …

Distinguishing Privacy Law: A Critique Of Privacy As Social Taxonomy, Maria P. Angel, Ryan Calo

Scholarly Works

What distinguishes violations of privacy from other harms? This has proven a surprisingly difficult question to answer. For over a century, privacy law scholars labored to define the illusive concept of privacy. Then they gave up. Efforts at distinguishing privacy came to be superseded at the turn of the millennium by a new approach: a taxonomy of privacy problems grounded in social recognition. Privacy law became the field that simply studies whatever courts or scholars talk about as related to privacy.

And it worked. Decades into privacy as social taxonomy, the field has expanded to encompass a broad range of …

Kafka In The Age Of Ai And The Futility Of Privacy As Control, Daniel Solove, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Despite writing more than a century ago, Franz Kafka captured the core problem of digital technologies—how individuals are rendered powerless and vulnerable. Over the past fifty years, and especially in the twenty-first century, privacy laws have been sprouting up around the world. These laws are often based heavily on an Individual Control Model that aims to empower individuals with rights to help them control the collection, use, and disclosure of their data.

In this Article, we argue that although Kafka starkly shows us the plight of the disempowered individual, his work also paradoxically suggests that empowering the individual isn’t the …

Fintech Lending In India: Taking Stock Of Implications For Privacy And Autonomy, Vidushi Marda, Amber Sinha

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

In the last five years, the Fintech sector has thrived in India, with Machine Learning (ML) driven credit scoring based on alternative data, emerging as a growing segment. The credit scoring industry in India needs to be viewed in light of a careful examination of rights, inclusion, appropriate safeguards and discrimination, currently missing from the discourse and practices. In this paper, we explain how ML-based credit scoring works, and the regulatory and commercial factors that have enabled and impeded its growth in India. Through legal and technological analysis, richened by insights from qualitative interviews with entrepreneurs and practitioners, we provide …

Aclu V. Clearview Ai, Inc.,, Isra Ahmed

DePaul Journal of Art, Technology & Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

A Loaded God Complex: The Unconstitutionality Of The Executive Branch’S Unilaterally Withholding Zero-Days, Brendan Gilligan

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

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 …

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 …

Inadequate Privacy: The Necessity Of Hipaa Reform In A Post-Dobbs World, Katherine Robertson

Seattle University Law Review

Part I of this Comment will provide an overview of HIPAA and the legal impacts of Dobbs. Part II will discuss the anticipatory response to the impacts of Dobbs on PHI by addressing the response from (1) the states, (2) the Biden Administration, and (3) the medical field. Part III will discuss the loopholes that exist in HIPAA and further address the potential impacts on individuals and the medical field if reform does not occur. Finally, Part IV will argue that the reform of HIPAA is the best avenue for protecting PHI related to reproductive healthcare.

Privacy Implications Of Central Bank Digital Currencies, Jiaying Jiang

UF Law Faculty Publications

One hundred thirty-one countries, representing over 98 percent of the global gross domestic product (GDP), are currently exploring central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), a new form of digital money that is different from privately issued cryptocurrencies and stablecoins. As central banks worldwide grapple with CBDC design options, privacy has become a critical feature and concern. Many central banks, government agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), think tanks, and even the general public have underscored the importance of privacy in CBDC systems. Moreover, a diverse group of economists, computer scientists, engineers, and legal scholars have embarked on crafting privacy-preserving CBDC designs.

But two …

An Essay About Privacy, Ronald Griffin

Journal Publications

Jessye Norman was an American opera singer. She died on October 1, 2019. On October 2, 2019, my wife got a grim diagnosis that put me in a stupor and reminded me, now more than ever, that my generation (that did so much good in the world) stands in line waiting for the Grim Reaper’s call. In a seventy-years (that have gone by too fast) I have watched my peers run from the realms of privacy, spaces where people implemented life plans uninterrupted by neighbours that were discernible, palpable, and real to everybody, to a realm where there is none. …

Securing Patent Law, Charles Duan

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

A vigorous conversation about intellectual property rights and national security has largely focused on the defense role of those rights, as tools for responding to acts of foreign infringement. But intellectual property, and patents in particular, also play an arguably more important offense role. Foreign competitor nations can obtain and assert U.S. patents against U.S. firms and creators. Use of patents as an offense strategy can be strategically coordinated to stymie domestic innovation and technological progress. This Essay considers current and possible future practices of patent exploitation in this offense setting, with a particular focus on China given the nature …