Privacy Law Commons^™

Protecting The Innocent: How To Prevent The Consequences Of Misidentification And Doxing By Volunteers Helping With Open Source Investigations, Leigh M. Dannhauser

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Individuals performing open source investigations can misidentify alleged perpetrators and dox innocent parties online, which can subsequently lead to threats and harassment against innocent parties and their loved ones. For example, threats were made against Sunil Tripathi’s family after he was wrongly identified as one of the Boston Marathon bombers and doxed on Reddit and Twitter. In 2020, the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations was published as a guide, and it includes a set of principles to govern open source investigations. However, the Berkeley Protocol is limited to open source investigations performed by those working for organizations. It …

Individualized Ideological Enclosures: The Generative Ai Crisis And How Consumers Can Reclaim Their Feeds, Sydney Rose

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Brokered Abuse, Thomas E. Kadri

Scholarly Works

This chapter examines how data brokers, companies that collect, sell, and trade personal information, enable and intensify interpersonal abuse. The article analyzes the data brokerage industry’s role in undermining personal obscurity, the relative safety that comes from being difficult to find or understand, and explores how current laws not only fail to address these harms but can make them worse. The chapter argues that existing privacy regimes, particularly those requiring victims to request data removal from individual brokers, impose psychological burdens and can retraumatize victims.

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 Efforts at distinguishing privacy came to be superseded at the turn of the millennium by a new approach: a taxonomy of privacy problems grounded in social recognition.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 …

Section 230 Reform, Liberalism, And Their Discontents, Mateusz Blaszczyk

Scholarly Works

The Section 230 debate is a proxy for reevaluating constitutional fundamentals. The modern right and the modern left, both attacking Section 230, have abandoned liberalism, together with free speech, public private divide, and the politics of neutrality. Instead of believing in First Amendment value pluralism, each side of the spectrum wishes to realize their own positive normative vision for the political community which, today, is largely defined in the realm of digital culture. Each side recognizes the political other as an enemy to their own utopia, wishing to control, censor, or simply become sovereign thereover. These existential politics of the …

Data In Business & Society, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Data, it is sometimes said, is the world’s new oil. Unlike the days when information was transmitted in print form, data is transmitted at the touch of a fingertip through the click of a mouse or a push of an icon on a phone app. Algorithms and computing systems have drastically expanded the scope, speed, and volume of access and use of data for consumers. Additionally, businesses, in variety of forms, including business-to-business, business-to-consumer, online, and even brick-and-mortar, have employed data to interact with other businesses and with consumers. Data has drastically expanded in use throughout business and society, and …

The Domestic And International Limitations Of The Third-Party Doctrine In The Digital Age, Miguel E. Serrano

American University Business Law Review

This Comment argues that the third-party doctrine further alienates EU-U.S. partnerships because the doctrine subverts privacy interests as binding legal precedent. Part II will explore the history of the third-party doctrine up until the Carpenter decision and explain why U.S. privacy rights are linked with access to third-party information. This Comment will further outline EU data protection laws, EU legislation, and the CJEU’s Schrems II decision. In Part III, this Comment will also analyze the new data protection framework, Executive Order 14086, and discuss whether it fails to overcome the CJEU’s concerns over U.S. privacy laws for EU subjects. By …

Growing Tensions: Consumer Privacy And Corporate Disclosures, Megan Wischmeier Shaner

Faculty Articles

Data privacy and data security have become key issues for legislators, regulators, and individual citizens. Roughly two-thirds of Americans believe their data is being regularly tracked, monitored, and collected by companies and the government. A majority of U.S. adults also believe their data is less secure today than five years ago, expressing concerns that they have little control over how their personal information is being used and that the entities who control their data are not responsible stewards. In the absence of comprehensive federal regulation, a continuous stream of privacy statutes have been proposed at the state level. Beginning with …

America's Next "Stop Model!": Model Deletion, Jevan Hutson, Ben Winters

Articles

This Essay explores the emergence of model deletion- the compelled destruction or dispossession of certain data, algorithms, models, and associated work products created or shaped by illegal means- as a remedy, right, and requirement for harmful applications of Al and ML systems. Part I examines model deletion's emergence as a consumer protection remedy and its conception as a positive right and regulatory requirement. Part II considers the constellation of federal and state actors, such as federal and state enforcement agencies and legislative bodies, who might seek model deletion to address particular Al and ML harms. Part III underscores the need …

Research Access To Social Media Data: Lessons From Clinical Trial Data Sharing, Christopher J. Morten, Gabriel Nicholas, Salomé Vilgoen

Articles

For years, social media companies have sparred with lawmakers over how much independent access to platform data they should provide researchers. Sharing data with researchers allows the public to better understand the risks and harms associated with social media, including areas such as misinformation, child safety, and political polarization. Yet researcher access is controversial. Privacy advocates and companies raise the potential privacy threats of researchers using such data irresponsibly. In addition, social media companies raise concerns over trade secrecy: the data these companies hold and the algorithms powered by that data are secretive sources of competitive advantage. This Article shows …

Privacy Nicks: How The Law Normalizes Surveillance, Woodrow N. Hartzog, Evan Selinger, Johanna Gunawan

Faculty Scholarship

Privacy law is failing to protect individuals from being watched and exposed, despite stronger surveillance and data protection rules. The problem is that our rules look to social norms to set thresholds for privacy violations, but people can get used to being observed. In this article, we argue that by ignoring de minimis privacy encroachments, the law is complicit in normalizing surveillance. Privacy law helps acclimate people to being watched by ignoring smaller, more frequent, and more mundane privacy diminutions. We call these reductions “privacy nicks,” like the proverbial “thousand cuts” that lead to death.
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Against Engagement, Neil Richards, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, we focus on a key dimension of commercial surveillance by data-intensive digital platforms that is too often treated as a supporting cast member instead of a star of the show: the concept of engagement. Engagement is, simply put, a measure of time, attention, and other interactions with a service. The economic logic of engagement is simple: more engagement equals more ads watched equals more revenue. Engagement is a lucrative digital business model, but it is problematic in several ways that lurk beneath the happy sloganeering of a “free” internet

Our goal in this Article is to isolate …

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 …

Two Ai Truths And A Lie, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Industry will take everything it can in developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. We will get used to it. This will be done for our benefit. Two of these things are true and one of them is a lie. It is critical that lawmakers identify them correctly. In this Essay, I argue that no matter how AI systems develop, if lawmakers do not address the dynamics of dangerous extraction, harmful normalization, and adversarial self-dealing, then AI systems will likely be used to do more harm than good.

Given these inevitabilities, lawmakers will need to change their usual approach to regulating technology. …

Expecting Medication Surveillance, Jennifer D. Oliva

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In response to federal financial incentives and mandates, all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and three U.S. territories administer electronic prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs). Federal and state policymakers justified the implementation and enhancement of ubiquitous prescription drug monitoring by contending that expansive state drug surveillance was a necessary weapon in the war against the American drug overdose crisis. As is often the case with tools designed for law enforcement surveillance, however, PDMPs have proven susceptible to mission creep. Although pioneer PDMPs were paper-based systems that limited their surveillance to a narrow class of heavily regulated controlled substances, modern …