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Selected Works

Robert Sprague

Law and Technology

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Privacy Law

Employee Electronic Communications In A Boundaryless World, Robert Sprague Dec 2015

Employee Electronic Communications In A Boundaryless World, Robert Sprague

Robert Sprague

In 2007, the National Labor Relations Board decided that an employer could maintain an email communications policy that prohibits nonwork-related messages, even if those messages involved communications otherwise protected under the National Labor Relations Act. In December 2014, the National Labor Relations Board reversed this holding, but in doing so, limited its decision to just workplace email. This article argues that such a prescription is outdated and archaic in light of today’s modern workplace filled with communications devices and systems that blur the distinction between work and personal life. This article explains that such a prescription can cause employees to …

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One Hundred Twenty Years Of U.S. Privacy Law Scholarship: A Latent Semantic Analysis, Robert Sprague, Kevin Grauberger, Nicole Barberis Apr 2015

One Hundred Twenty Years Of U.S. Privacy Law Scholarship: A Latent Semantic Analysis, Robert Sprague, Kevin Grauberger, Nicole Barberis

Robert Sprague

This paper reports results from a research project aimed at identifying fundamental privacy law principles derived from the writings of legal scholars and commentators using probabilistic topic modeling, which is comprised of a suite of algorithms that attempt to discover hidden thematic structures in large archives of documents. Topic modeling algorithms are statistical methods that analyze the words of texts to discover topics (themes) contained within, how those topics are connected to each other, and how they change over time. A latent Dirichlet allocation process, which identifies sets of terms that more tightly co-occur, is incorporated into the topic modeling …

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Invasion Of The Social Networks: Blurring The Line Between Personal Life And The Employment Relationship, Robert Sprague Dec 2010

Invasion Of The Social Networks: Blurring The Line Between Personal Life And The Employment Relationship, Robert Sprague

Robert Sprague

Over one-half billion people worldwide have registered accounts with Facebook, the most popular online social network. This article addresses some of the more significant employment-related legal issues arising from the growing popularity of online social networks. First, the need for employers to investigate the background of prospective employees is examined from the context of employers using online social networks to conduct those investigations. In particular, this article analyzes the degree to which job applicants have privacy rights in the information they post online. This article then examines the interrelationship between online social networks and employees, focusing on limitations faced by …

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Orwell Was An Optimist: The Evolution Of Privacy In The United States And Its De-Evolution For American Employees, Robert Sprague Dec 2007

Orwell Was An Optimist: The Evolution Of Privacy In The United States And Its De-Evolution For American Employees, Robert Sprague

Robert Sprague

This Article argues that the difficulties associated with understanding and applying rights to privacy in modern America, and its near extinction, particularly for employees, are a direct result of the conceptual approach used to determine whether a legal right to privacy exists. This approach was formally adopted in the latter part of the twentieth century and it makes privacy protection dependent upon any given situation, determined by whether there is a reasonable expectation of privacy for that given situation. This makes the current right to privacy in the United States contextual, fluid, and easily subject to elimination. One of the …

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