Internet Law Commons^™

The Right To Privacy And Data Protection In Times Of Armed Conflict, Asaf Lubin, Russell Buchan

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

Contemporary warfare yields a profound impact on the rights to privacy and data protection. Technological advances in the fields of electronic surveillance, predictive algorithms, big data analytics, user-generated evidence, artificial intelligence, cloud storage, facial recognition, and cryptography are redefining the scope, nature, and contours of military operations. Yet, international humanitarian law offers very few, if any, lex specialis rules for the lawful processing, analysis, dissemination, and retention of personal information. This edited anthology offers a pioneering account of the current and potential future application of digital rights in armed conflict.

In Part I Mary Ellen O’Connell, Tal Mimran and Yuval …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Implementing Data Protection By Design In The Ed Tech Context: What Is The Role Of Technology Providers?, Liane Colonna

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

This article explores the specific roles and responsibilities of technology providers when it comes to implementing Data Protection by Design (“DPbD”) and Data Protection by Default (“DPbDf”). As an example, it looks at the Education Technology (“Ed Tech”) sector and the complexities of the supply chains that exist therein to highlight that, in addition to the Higher Education (“HE”) institutions that procure products and services for advancing teaching and learning, Ed Tech vendors may also have responsibility and liability for the processing of student’s personal data. Ultimately, this paper asks whether there are any legal gaps, ambiguities, or normative conflicts …

Remedying Online Shaming, Miriam Marcowitz-Bitton, Hillel Sommer

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

Shaming is an act of subjecting someone publicly to shame, disgrace, humiliation, or disrepute.1 This act has challenged many existing legal regimes. Its effects are devastating, and efforts to cope with it within the current legal framework have been largely unsuccessful, mainly due to the challenges posed by anonymous, online shaming. This article rethinks the remedies currently available to handle shaming. It touches upon both civil and criminal remedies and penalties, considering the role that the right to be forgotten can play in handling shaming effectively. The article argues that only by complementing existing remedies with victims' rights can we …

Crying Cda Immunity: Tech Companies' Knee-Jerk Defense To Child Sexual Exploitation & Product Liability Claims, Carrie Goldberg, Naomi Leeds

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

The article argues that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is being misapplied by tech companies like Omegle to avoid liability in cases involving child sexual exploitation and product liability. It contends that Section 230 immunity should not shield companies when claims pertain to product design flaws and trafficking, emphasizing the need for courts to recognize the distinction between content moderation and product-related harms.

Panel 1: Sexual Exploitation, Sex Workers, And Section 230, Mary Graw Leary, Kendra Albert, Carrie Goldberg, Felix Wu

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

The article examines the implications of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, focusing on its impact on sexual exploitation, sex workers, and online speech. Panelists discuss the unintended consequences of legislative changes like FOSTA-SESTA and propose reforms such as the EARN IT Act to address child sexual abuse material (CSAM). They emphasize the need to balance protecting victims with safeguarding legitimate speech, particularly for marginalized communities, and advocate for comprehensive reforms rather than piecemeal changes.

Platforms As Blackacres, Thomas E. Kadri

Articles

While writing this Article, I interviewed a journalist who writes stories about harmful technologies. To do this work, he gathers information from websites to reveal trends that online platforms would prefer to hide. His team has exposed how Facebook threatens people's privacy and safety, how Amazon hides cheaper deals from consumers, and how Google diverts political speech from our inboxes. You'd think the journalist might want credit for telling these important stories, but he instead insisted on anonymity when we talked because his lawyer was worried he'd be confessing to breaking the law-to committing the crime and tort of cyber-trespass. …

Juridical Discourse For Platforms, Thomas E. Kadri

Scholarly Works

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has created a private “Supreme Court,” or so he says. Since 2021, his company’s Oversight Board has issued verdicts on a smattering of Facebook’s decisions about online speech. Cynics frame the Board as a Potemkin village, but defenders invoke analogies to separation of powers to claim that this new body empowers the public and restrains the company. Some are even calling for a single “platform supreme court” to rule over the entire industry.

Juridical discourse for platforms is powerful, but it can also be deceptive. This Response explores how juridical discourse has legitimized and empowered Facebook’s …

Understanding Chilling Effects, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

With digital surveillance and censorship on the rise, the amount of data available online unprecedented, and corporate and governmental actors increasingly employing emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and facial recognition technology (FRT) for surveillance and data analytics, concerns about “chilling effects”, that is, the capacity for these activities “chill” or deter people from exercising their rights and freedoms have taken on greater urgency and importance. Yet, there remains a clear dearth in systematic theoretical and empirical work point. This has left significant gaps in understanding. This article has attempted to fill that void, synthesizing theoretical and empirical …

Platforms, Encryption, And The Cfaa: The Case Of Whatsapp V Nso Group, Jonathon Penney, Bruce Schneier

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

End-to-end encryption technology has gone mainstream. But this wider use has led hackers, cybercriminals, foreign governments, and other threat actors to employ creative and novel attacks to compromise or workaround these protections, raising important questions as to how the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the primary federal anti-hacking statute, is best applied to these new encryption implementations. Now, after the Supreme Court recently narrowed the CFAA’s scope in Van Buren and suggested it favors a code-based approach to liability under the statute, understanding how best to theorize sophisticated code-based access barriers like end-to-end encryption, and their circumvention, is now …

Death Of The Limited License To Data: United States V. Van Buren, Nick Curley

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

The United States Supreme Court has normally viewed data as property. Yet in United States v. Van Buren, the Court abandoned the property law angle. Van Buren included examination of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act’s applicability to a police officer who accepted a bribe from undercover agents to look up a phony license plate. The Court held that under the CFAA someone only “exceeds authorized access” when they properly access a computer and then improperly access files “that are off limits to [them].”

This Case Note explores why the Supreme Court should not have abandoned the property analogy …

The Deficiencies Of Oregon Ballot Measure 110, Jacob Towles

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

In 1970, the Federal Government enacted the Controlled Substance Act (CSA), which made certain drugs and substances illegal absent a medical prescription. The control of drugs through the CSA exists to prevent harm to the public. Nonetheless, some cities and states have enacted laws that allow for the benefit of selling or pleasure of using illegal drugs to outweigh the legal ramifications.

In November 2020, The Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act, also known as Oregon Ballot Measure 110 (Measure 110), made Oregon the first state in the country to decriminalize all drugs. Measure 110 was enacted with the overarching …

Tax's Digital Labor Dilemma, Amanda Parsons

Publications

Digitalization has reshaped the relationship between companies and their customers and users. Customers and users increasingly serve a dual role. They are not only consumers but also producers, creating data and content. They are a value-creating workforce, functioning as “digital laborers.”

Digital laborers’ value creation highlights that there are two parts to the question of whether multinational companies are paying their “fair share” of taxes—one of amount and one of location. First, are companies’ total tax bills paid across all countries in line with their global income? Second, is taxing authority over multinational companies’ income being divided amongst countries in …

Synchronizing Copyright And Technology: A New Paradigm For Sync Rights, Michael Goodyear

Articles & Chapters

Embedded in a copyright owner’s musical work or sound recording is the synchronization, or sync right. One of the least discussed aspects of music copyright, considerations about sync have come to the fore as the world has increasingly moved from the real world to the virtual. The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred thousands of activities and events to go online. With many of these involving music, the shift to the virtual world has raised new questions about the extent of sync rights.

Traditionally, sync rights were meant to require licenses for the use of music in timed-relation to a film or …

Table Of Contents

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Masthead, Lead Article Editor

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, Lead Article Editor

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

À La Carte Cable: A Regulatory Solution To The Misinformation Subsidy, Christopher R. Terry, Eliezer J. Silberberg, Stephen Schmitz, John Stack, Eve Sando

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Although “fake news” is as old as mass media itself, concerns over disinformation have reached a fever pitch in our current media environment. Online media outlets’ heavy reliance on user-generated content has altered the traditional gatekeeping functions and professional standards associated with traditional news organizations. The idea of objectivity-focused informational content has primarily been substituted for a realist acceptance of the power and popularity of opinion-driven “news.” This shift is starkly visible now: mainstream news media outlets knowingly spread hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and the like.

This current state of affairs is not some freak accident. The Supreme Court’s First Amendment …

The Wild West Of Data Privacy: Why Rhode Island Needs To Enact Comprehensive Legislation To Protect Consumers’ Data, Candace Quinn

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Blockchain Disruption: Digital Assets Are Changing How We Do Business, Nick Curley

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Digital assets are changing the way businesses think about equity, labor, business models, and business organization. Digital assets, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, provide incredible opportunities to further align shareholders with the objectives of the entity.

Each time humanity advances its technology for ledgers, markets explode, and we witness immense wealth creation. Digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum are the next great step forward for ledger technology. While there are incredible opportunities to leverage this new technology, there are also incredible risks. There are many public examples of “hacks” of prominent blockchains like Ethereum and Solana. Blockchain technology has captured the …

Rear Window: The Future Of Hollywood Contracting In The Streaming Age, Miller Friedman

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Onlife Harms: Uber And Sexual Violence, Amanda Turnbull

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Uber markets itself as a technology company that is managed primarily by ML algorithms with the support of human engineers. Yet, in its 2019 Report, the role that its technology played in relation to sexual violence is, for all intents and purposes, absent. Likewise, solutions dealing specifically with the role of technology in facilitating gender-based violence are also missing from the series of initiatives in which Uber has invested that are aimed at preventing sexual violence. Uber was not sufficiently rigorous in defining the problem it was trying to solve. It was a missed opportunity that has resulted in continued …

Bringing Section 8 Home: An Argument For Recognizing A Reasonable Expectation Of Privacy In Metadata Collected From Smart Home Devices, Ana Qarri

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Internet of Things devices (also known as smart home devices) are a fast-growing trend in consumer home electronics. The information collected from these devices could prove very useful to law enforcement investigations. These individual pieces of metadata — the collection of which might appear harmless on its face — can be highly revealing when combined with other metadata or information otherwise available to law enforcement. This article builds an argument in favour of recognizing a reasonable expectation of privacy in metadata collected from smart home devices under section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This article presents …

Let The Machines Do The Dirty Work: Social Media, Machine Learning Technology And The Iteration Of Racialized Surveillance, Subhah Wadhawan

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Post 9/11, where the current social and cultural temperature has constructed Islam as interchangeable with terrorism, digital intermediaries have responded with increased censorship of speech related to, emerging from, or advocating Islamic ideology. At the heart of this paper is the argument that digital intermediaries have relied on the opaqueness of machine learning technology (‘‘MLT”) to realize racialized surveillance, whereby speech concerning Islamic content has been disproportionally censored. This paper maps out how inherent biases concerning the ideology of Islam have been interwoven into the coding and machine learning used by the major tech giants. As a result of the …

Legislating Data Loyalty, Woodrow Hartzog, Neil Richards

Faculty Scholarship

Lawmakers looking to embolden privacy law have begun to consider imposing duties of loyalty on organizations trusted with people’s data and online experiences. The idea behind loyalty is simple: organizations should not process data or design technologies that conflict with the best interests of trusting parties. But the logistics and implementation of data loyalty need to be developed if the concept is going to be capable of moving privacy law beyond its “notice and consent” roots to confront people’s vulnerabilities in their relationship with powerful data collectors.

In this short Essay, we propose a model for legislating data loyalty. Our …

Requiring What’S Not Required: Circuit Courts Are Disregarding Supreme Court Precedent And Revisiting Officer Inadvertence In Cyberlaw Cases, Michelle Zakarin

Scholarly Works

As the age of technology has taken this country by surprise and left us with an inability to formally prepare our legal system to incorporate these advances, many courts are forced to adapt by applying pre-technology rules to new technological scenarios. One illustration is the plain view exception to the Fourth Amendment. Recently, the issue of officer inadvertence at the time of the search, a rule that the United States Supreme Court has specifically stated is not required in plain view inquiries, has been revisited in cyber law cases. It could be said that the courts interested in the existence …

Fifth-Dimensional Warfare And National Security In Canada: Situating Microdeviation Theory Within C-59: An Act Respecting National Security Matters, Hayden Slight

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In an era of rapid technological change, the growing threat environment in the cyber dimension will continue to influence how a sovereign nation contends with attacks that can occur from any corner of the world. The growing adaptation and expansion of technology belonging to the Internet of Things (IoT) and the increasing prevalence of social media (Facebook, Twitter) has also influenced the spreading of attack surfaces that can become victim to exploitation by motivated parties including foreign states and terrorist groups. Against this backdrop, Canada’s own efforts to modernize and reinforce its own national security agencies resulted in the developing …

Legislating Data Loyalty, Neil M. Richards, Woodrow Hartzog

Scholarship@WashULaw

Lawmakers looking to embolden privacy law have begun to consider imposing duties of loyalty on organizations trusted with people’s data and online experiences. The idea behind loyalty is simple: organizations should not process data or design technologies that conflict with the best interests of trusting parties. But the logistics and implementation of data loyalty need to be developed if the concept is going to be capable of moving privacy law beyond its “notice and consent” roots to confront people’s vulnerabilities in their relationship with powerful data collectors.

In this short Essay, we propose a model for legislating data loyalty. Our …

Understanding American Privacy, Neil M. Richards, Andrew B. Serwin, Tyler Blake

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article is an explanation of some of the key features of American privacy law for a general audience. In particular, it tries to explain American privacy law against the critique that because the US currently lacks a European-style privacy law, the United States lacks much in the way of privacy law. We argue that the lack of a European-style data protection law in the United States is not the end of the analysis. This article therefore offers a basic roadmap to American privacy law for the uninitiated. In order to understand American privacy, we believe that it is important …

The Surprising Virtues Of Data Loyalty, Neil M. Richards, Woodrow Hartzog

Scholarship@WashULaw

Lawmakers in the United States and Europe are seriously considering imposing duties of data loyalty that implement ideas from privacy law scholarship, but critics claim such duties are unnecessary, unworkable, overly individualistic, and indeterminately vague. This paper takes those criticisms seriously, and its analysis of them reveals that duties of data loyalty have surprising virtues. Loyalty, it turns out, can support collective well-being by embracing privacy’s relational turn; it can be a powerful state of mind for reenergizing privacy reform; it prioritizes human values rather than potentially empty formalism; and it offers solutions that are flexible and clear rather than …