Privacy Law Commons^™

Mainstreaming Privacy Torts, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis proposed a privacy tort and seventy years later, William Prosser conceived it as four wrongs. In both eras, privacy invasions primarily caused psychic and reputational wounds of a particular sort. Courts insisted upon significant proof due to those injuries’ alleged ethereal nature. Digital networks alter this calculus by exacerbating the injuries inflicted. Because humiliating personal information posted online has no expiration date, neither does individual suffering. Leaking databases of personal information and postings that encourage assaults invade privacy in ways that exact significant financial and physical harm. This dispels concerns that plaintiffs might …

Location-Based Services: Time For A Privacy Check-In, Chris Conley, Nicole Ozer, Hari O'Connell, Ellen Ginsburg, Tamar Gubins

Faculty Scholarship

Need to get directions when you are lost? Want to know if your friends are in the neighborhood? Location-based services – applications and websites that provide services based on your current location – can put this information and more in the palm of your hand.

But outdated privacy laws and varying corporate practices could mean that sensitive information about who you are, where you go, what you do, and who you know end up being shared, sold, or turned over to the government.

Can location-based services protect your privacy? Do they? And what can we do to improve the situation? …

Fulfilling Government 2.0'S Promise With Robust Privacy Protections, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

The public can now “friend” the White House and scores of agencies on social networks, virtual worlds, and video-sharing sites. The Obama Administration sees this trend as crucial to enhancing governmental transparency, public participation, and collaboration. As the President has underscored, government needs to tap into the public’s expertise because it doesn’t have all of the answers.

To be sure, Government 2.0 might improve civic engagement. But it also might produce privacy vulnerabilities because agencies often gain access to individuals’ social network profiles, photographs, videos, and contact lists when interacting with individuals online. Little would prevent agencies from using and …

Visionary Pragmatism And The Value Of Privacy In The Twenty-First Century, Danielle K. Citron, Leslie Meltzer Henry

Faculty Scholarship

Despite extensive scholarly, legislative, and judicial attention to privacy, our understanding of privacy and the interests it protects remains inadequate. At the crux of this problem is privacy’s protean nature: it means “so many different things to so many different people” that attempts to articulate just what it is, or why it is important, generally have failed or become unwieldy. As a result, important privacy problems remain unaddressed, often to society’s detriment.

In his newest book, Understanding Privacy, Daniel J. Solove aims to reverse this state of affairs with a pluralistic conception of privacy that recognizes the societal value of …

Cloud Computing: Storm Warning For Privacy?, Nicole Ozer, Chris Conley

Faculty Scholarship

“Cloud computing” - the ability to create, store, and manipulate data through Web-based services - is growing in popularity. Cloud computing itself may not transform society; for most consumers, it is simply an appealing alternative tool for creating and storing the same records and documents that people have created for years. However, outdated laws and varying corporate practices mean that documents created and stored in the cloud may not have the same protections as the same documents stored in a filing cabinet or on a home computer. Can cloud computing services protect the privacy of their consumers? Do they? And …

Mission Creep: Public Health Surveillance And Medical Privacy, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

The National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program has parallels in the growth of disease surveillance for public health purposes. This article explores whether laws requiring health providers to report to government names and identifiable information about patients with infectious or chronic diseases may be vulnerable to challenge as an invasion of privacy. A shift in the use of disease surveillance data from investigating disease outbreaks to data mining and analysis for research, budgeting, and policy planning, as well as bioterrorism, tests the boundaries of liberty and privacy. The Supreme Court has not reviewed a disease reporting law. Its few related …

Medicine And Public Health: Crossing Legal Boundaries, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

In 2006, New York City began a mandatory reporting system for laboratories to submit blood sugar (A1c) test results (primarily for diabetes) to the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene without the patient's consent. This article examines whether this new program is an innovative way to improve New Yorkers' health, an invasion of medical privacy, or usurpation of the physician's role. The registry is an example of public health initiatives in chronic diseases, which challenge the limits of laws governing medicine care and public health programs by blurring the historical boundaries between them.

Reservoirs Of Danger: The Evolution Of Public And Private Law At The Dawn Of The Information Age, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

A defining problem at the dawn of the Information Age will be securing computer databases of ultra-sensitive personal information. These reservoirs of data fuel our Internet economy but endanger individuals when their information escapes into the hands of cyber-criminals. This juxtaposition of opportunities for rapid economic growth and novel dangers recalls similar challenges society and law faced at the outset of the Industrial Age. Then, reservoirs collected water to power textile mills: the water was harmless in repose but wrought havoc when it escaped. After initially resisting Rylands v. Fletcher's strict liability standard as undermining economic development, American courts and …

Privacy And The Criminal Arrestee Or Suspect: In Search Of A Right, In Need Of A Rule, Sadiq Reza

Faculty Scholarship

Criminal accusation stigmatizes. Merely having been accused of a crime lasts in the public eye, damaging one's reputation and threatening current and future employment, relationships, social status, and more. But vast numbers of criminal cases are dismissed soon after arrest, and countless accusations are unfounded or unprovable. Nevertheless, police officers and prosecutors routinely name criminal accusees to the public upon arrest or suspicion, with no obligation to publicize a defendant's exoneration, or the dismissal of his case, or a decision not to file charges against him at all. Other individuals caught up in the criminal process enjoy protections against the …

The Magic Lantern Revealed: A Report Of The Fbi's New Key Logging Trojan And Analysis Of Its Possible Treatment In A Dynamic Legal Landscape, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Magic Lantern presents several difficult legal questions that are left unanswered due to new or non-existent statutes and case law directly pertaining to the unique situation that Magic Lantern creates. ²⁵ The first concern is statutory. It is unclear what laws, if any, will apply when Magic Lantern is put into use.²⁶ The recent terrorist attacks in the United States have brought the need for information as a matter of national security to the forefront. Congress recently passed legislation (i.e. USA PATRIOT Act) ²⁷ that dramatically modifies current surveillance law, thus further complicating the untested waters of a …

Draft Of From Privacy To Publicity - 1991, Wendy J. Gordon

Scholarship Chronologically

In defense of a "right 'to be let alone'", Warren and Brandeis published their landmark article, The Right to Privacy, approximately one hundred years ago. Over seventy years later, the American Law Institute endorsed a tort right in defense of privacy, and also included in its section on privacy rights a cause of action to redress "appropriation" of one's "name or likeness". Since then courts have used various bases to grant celebrities rights to protect their commercial identities from commercial exploitation by others. Although most states now recognize a right of publicity either by judicial decision or statute, the cause …