Privacy Law Commons^™

Is There A Fundamental Right To Privacy When An Educational Institution Requires A Student To Disclose Proof Of His Or Her Vaccination Status?, Mary D. Fatscher

Touro Law Review

In 2020, the coronavirus disease (“COVID-19”) dominated the world. Although the public has progressively become more informed about the disease and how to safeguard itself, challenges persist as there is still much unknown. Aside from wearing masks, social distancing, and despite its undetermined consequences, the COVID-19 vaccination has emerged as a primary solution to substantially reducing the incidence and severity of the virus in our country. Many COVID-19 vaccine mandates were initiated once three pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies including Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson received Emergency Use Authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”).

24th Annual Open Government Summit 2022, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Rhode Island Office Of The Attorney General

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Anonymous Companies, William J. Moon

Faculty Scholarship

Hardly a day goes by without hearing about nefarious activities facilitated by anonymous “shell” companies. Often described as menaces to the financial system, the creation of business entities with no real operations in sun-drenched offshore jurisdictions offering “zero percent” tax rates remains in vogue among business titans, pop stars, multimillionaires, and royals. The trending headlines and academic accounts, however, have paid insufficient attention to the legal uses of anonymous companies that are both ubiquitous and almost infinite in their variations.

This Article identifies privacy as a functional feature of modern business entities by documenting the hidden virtues of anonymous companies—business …

Individuals As Gatekeepers Against Data Misuse, Ying Hu

Michigan Technology Law Review

This article makes a case for treating individual data subjects as gatekeepers against misuse of personal data. Imposing gatekeeper responsibility on individuals is most useful where (a) the primary wrongdoers engage in data misuse intentionally or recklessly; (b) misuse of personal data is likely to lead to serious harm; and (c) one or more individuals are able to detect and prevent data misuse at a reasonable cost.

As gatekeepers, individuals should have a legal duty to take reasonable measures to prevent data misuse where they are aware of facts indicating that the person seeking personal data from them is highly …

Pure Privacy, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Publications

n 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis began a storied legal tradition of trying to conceptualize privacy. Since that time, privacy's appeal has grown beyond those authors' wildest expectations, but its essence remains elusive. One of the rare points of agreement in boisterous academic privacy debates is that there is no consensus on what privacy means.

The modern trend is to embrace the ambiguity. Unable to settle on boundaries, scholars welcome a broad array of interests into an expanding theoretical framework. As a result, privacy is invoked in debates about COVID-19 contact tracing, police body cameras, marriage equality, facial recognition, …

Law Library Blog (January 2021): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Cognitive Biases, Dark Patterns, And The ‘Privacy Paradox’, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

Scholars and commentators often argue that individuals do not care about their privacy, and that users routinely trade privacy for convenience. This ignores the cognitive biases and design tactics platforms use to manipulate users into disclosing information. This essay highlights some of those cognitive biases – from hyperbolic discounting to the problem of overchoice – and discusses the ways in which platform design can manipulate disclosure. It then explains how current law allows this manipulative and anti-consumer behavior to continue and proposes a new approach to reign in the phenomenon.

Secret Searches: The Sca's Standing Conundrum, Aviv S. Halpern

Michigan Law Review

The Stored Communications Act (“SCA”) arms federal law enforcement agencies with the ability to use a special type of warrant to access users’ electronically stored communications. In some circumstances, SCA warrants can require service providers to bundle and produce a user’s electronically stored communications without ever disclosing the existence of the warrant to the individual user until charges are brought. Users that are charged will ultimately receive notice of the search after the fact through their legal proceedings. Users that are never charged, however, may never know that their communications were obtained and searched. This practice effectively makes the provisions …

Against Notice And Choice: The Manifest Failure Of The Proceduralist Paradigm To Protect Privacy Online (Or Anywhere Else), John A. Rothchild

Cleveland State Law Review

Notice and choice are the foundational principles underlying the regulation of privacy in online transactions and in most other situations in which individuals interact with the government and commercial interests. These principles mean that before collecting personally identifiable information (PII) from an individual, the collector must provide the individual with a disclosure (notice) of what PII it proposes to collect and how it proposes to use that information. That knowledge enables the individual to make a rational decision (choice) about whether to allow that collection of information, generally by declining to enter into the transaction or, in some situations, by …

Ferpa Close-Up: When Video Captures Violence And Injury, Richard J. Peltz-Steele, Kitty L. Cone

Faculty Publications

Federal privacy law is all to often misconstrued or perverted to preclude the disclosure of video recordings that capture students victimized by violent crime or tortious injury. This misuse of federal law impedes transparency and accountability and, in many cases, even jeopardizes the health, safety, and lives of children. When properly construed, however, federal law is no bar to disclosure and, at least in public schools, works in tandem with freedom of information laws to ensure disclosure. This Article posits that without unequivocal guidance from federal administrative authorities, uncertainty regarding the disclosure of such recordings will continue to linger, jeopardizing …

Blethen Maine Newspapers, Inc. V. State: Balancing The Public's Right To Know Against The Privacy Rights Of Victims Of Sexual Abuse, Kenleigh A. Nicoletta

Maine Law Review

In Blethen Maine Newspapers, Inc. v. State, a sharply divided Maine Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, held that release of records relating to Attorney General G. Steven Rowe's investigation of alleged sexual abuse by Catholic priests was warranted under Maine's Freedom of Access Act (FOAA). Although such investigative records are designated confidential by statute, the majority held that the public's interest in the contents of the records mandated their disclosure after all information identifying persons other than the deceased priests had been redacted. The concurrence asserted that the majority had reached the correct conclusion, but in so …

Trending @ Rwu Law: Professor David Coombs's Post: Veterans Court's Decision Will Affect Rwu Law's Veterans Disability Field Clinic: 02-24-2016, David Coombs

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Good Cause Is Bad News: How The Good Cause Standard For Record Access Impacts Adult Adoptees Seeking Personal Information And A Proposal For Reform, Christopher G.A. Loriot

University of Massachusetts Law Review

There are many hurdles that adult adoptees face when seeking access to personal information contained in original birth records or adoption proceedings. One such hurdle is the widely-used good cause standard, which requires adoptees seeking information to show good cause to obtain access. This standard is problematic primarily for its vagueness. Very few jurisdictions that use this standard define “good cause” in any meaningful way, and case law interpreting good cause statutory language is inconsistent at best. Although it is meant to protect the privacy interests of all parties in an adoption proceeding, the good cause standard acts as a …

Avoiding Unintended Disclosure: Representing Clients With Hiv And Aids, Lashanda Taylor Adams

Journal Articles

When the HIV/AIDS epidemic was initially recognized in the United States, many attorneys wondered what it would mean to represent a client with HIV. As the number of HIV-infected individuals grew, so did the need for attorneys to represent them. Specifically, attorneys questioned whether or not their duty of confidentiality would expose them to civil liability from failing to protect a third party.1 In response to this concern, several law review articles were written discussing the dilemma faced by attorneys bound by professional rules of conduct.2 These articles focused on the needs of the attorney and the public rather than …

The 1 Percent Solution: Corporate Tax Returns Should Be Public (And How To Get There), Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Ariel Siman

Articles

The justification for publishing corporate tax returns is that corporations are given immense benefits by the state that bestows upon them unlimited life and limited liability, and therefore they owe the public the information of how they treat the state that created them. Tax returns, like the financial disclosures that publicly traded corporations must file with the SEC, also provide useful information to shareholders, creditors, and the investing public.

Politics And The Public’S Right To Know, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Journal Articles

In the United States it is taken for granted that members of the public should have access to information about their government. This access takes many forms, including the ability to obtain copies of government documents, the ability to attend meetings of government officials, and the related obligations of government officials to document their activities and to reveal certain otherwise private information about themselves. This access also is often limited by countervailing concerns, such as the privacy of individual citizens and national security. Nevertheless, the presumption both at the federal level and in every state is to provide such access. …

The Politics Of Privacy In The Criminal Justice System: Information Disclosure, The Fourth Amendment, And Statutory Law Enforcement Exemptions, Erin Murphy

Michigan Law Review

When criminal justice scholars think of privacy, they think of the Fourth Amendment. But lately its domain has become far less absolute. The United States Code currently contains over twenty separate statutes that restrict both the acquisition and release of covered information. Largely enacted in the latter part of the twentieth century, these statutes address matters vital to modern existence. They control police access to driver's licenses, educational records, health histories, telephone calls, email messages, and even video rentals. They conform to no common template, but rather enlist a variety of procedural tools to serve as safeguards - ranging from …

Information Escrows, Ian Ayres, Cait Unkovic

Michigan Law Review

A variety of information escrows - including allegation escrows, suspicion escrows, and shared-interest escrows - hold the promise of reducing the first-mover disadvantage that can deter people with socially valuable private information from disclosing that information to others. Information escrows allow people to transmit sensitive information to a trusted intermediary, an escrow agent, who only forwards the information under prespecified conditions. For example, an allegation escrow for sexual harassment might allow a victim to place a private complaint into escrow with instructions that the complaint be lodged with the proper authorities only if the escrow agent receives at least one …

Protecting Anonymous Expression: The Internet's Role In Washington State's Disclosure Laws And The Direct Democracy Process, Karen Cullinane

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Note proposes that the Washington State Legislature amend its Public Records Act to exempt from public disclosure personal information legally required to be disclosed by signers of referendum petitions. This Note also proposes that the Washington State Legislature designate an electronic system, to be detailed in its election law, by which referendum petitions can be checked for fraud without violating the right to anonymous expression protected by the First Amendment. Part I describes Washington State's referendum process and the path of Doe v. Reed, the case animating the reform presented in this Note. Part II illustrates how the rise …

Ten Years After: Bartnicki V. Vopper As Laboratory For First Amendment Advocacy And Analysis, Eric Easton

All Faculty Scholarship

How many ways can one approach a First Amendment analysis? What influences a lawyer or a judge to select one analytical approach over another? And what is the long-term effect of a court's choice of one over another? In Bartnicki v. Vopper, a 2001 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court considered federal and state statutes prohibiting the disclosure of illegally intercepted telephone conversations, we are privileged to have a small laboratory through which to study the first two questions. And, from the vantage point of ten years, we ought to be able to make some informed predictions as to …

The Intersection Between Finance And Intellectual Property: Trade Secrets, Hedge Funds, And Section 13(F) Of The Exchange Act, Erin E. Martin

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Confidentiality Of Educational Records And Child Protective Proceedings, Frank E. Vandervort

Book Chapters

The Federal Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which provides funding for state educational programming, requires that student records be disclosed to a nonparent only with the written consent of the child’s parent, unless the disclosure falls within one of the several exceptions detailed in the statute. One of the exemptions provided for in the federal law permits a school to disclose information to “state or local officials or authorities to whom [that] information is allowed to be reported or disclosed pursuant to state statute,” if that official certifies in writing “that the information will not be disclosed to …

The Impact Of Family Paradigms, Domestic Constitutions, And International Conventions On Disclosure Of An Adopted Person's Identities And Heritage: A Comparative Examination, D. Marianne Brower Blair

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article examines the extent to which international law has and will potentially influence the direction of the reform and implementation of adoption disclosure norms. Though it does not yet appear that international law mandates recognition of an absolute right to identifying information when such disclosure is opposed by a birth parent or adoptee, examination of these conventions and the response of the international community underscores the critical importance of identifying information to many adoptees, and a growing movement to afford primacy to their interests.

A Study In Regulatory Method, Local Political Cultures, And Jurisprudential Voice: The Application Of Federal Confidentiality Law To Project Head Start, Richard C. Boldt

Michigan Law Review

This article focuses on one particular set of issues raised by the effort to coordinate the activities of Head Start centers with those of substance abuse treatment programs and the introduction of treatment and prevention functions into the daily interactions of Head Start staff and parents. These issues involve the disclosure of potentially damaging information about a Head Start parent's drug or alcohol abuse and the confidentiality considerations that arise when she or he has sought or received treatment for that abuse. Although it is possible to characterize these issues as technical, doctrinal questions of statutory and regulatory interpretation, it …

A Study In Regulatory Method, Local Political Cultures, And Jurisprudential Voice: The Application Of Federal Confidentiality Law To Project Head Start, Richard C. Boldt

Michigan Law Review

This article focuses on one particular set of issues raised by the effort to coordinate the activities of Head Start centers with those of substance abuse treatment programs and the introduction of treatment and prevention functions into the daily interactions of Head Start staff and parents. These issues involve the disclosure of potentially damaging information about a Head Start parent's drug or alcohol abuse and the confidentiality considerations that arise when she or he has sought or received treatment for that abuse. Although it is possible to characterize these issues as technical, doctrinal questions of statutory and regulatory interpretation, it …

Whose Genes Are These Anyway?: Familial Conflicts Over Access To Genetic Information, Sonia M. Suter

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues first that courts and legislatures should follow a presumption against mandating disclosure of a person's genetic information to third parties. Second, genetic testing for the benefit of a third party should not, and constitutionally cannot, be compelled. Part I presents an overview of genetics and discusses the special legal and ethical issues genetic testing poses. Part II examines the issue of nonconsensual disclosure to family members, who could potentially use the information from tests that have already been performed. This Part concludes that there should be a presumption against disclosure. Part III examines a related, but different, …

Collective Bargaining In The Federal Public Sector: Disclosing Employee Names And Addresses Under Exemption 6 Of The Freedom Of Information Act, Trina Jones

Michigan Law Review

This Note examines the application of FOIA and the Privacy Act to union requests for employee names and addresses under the Fed. LM Statute. Part I briefly explores the importance of employee names and addresses to collective bargaining. This Part also examines the increasingly significant role of public sector unions due to the growth in federal public sector employment and the decline of private sector unionization. Part II analyzes the various circuit court decisions supporting disclosure in the federal public sector. Part III examines Reporters Committee and Department of the Treasury and discusses the potential policy implications resulting from the …

Threshold Requirements For The Fbi Under Exemption 7 Of The Freedom Of Information Act, Richard A. Kaba

Michigan Law Review

This Note examines Exemption 7 of the FOIA as it relates to FBP0 information and seeks to determine the appropriate rule for the first prong of the Abramson test. Part I of this Note examines Exemption 7 in the 1966, 1974, and 1986 FOIAs, the judicial opinions interpreting this exemption, and the legislative histories of the 1966, 1974, and 1986 FOIAs as they relate to Exemption 7. Part II compares the per se and threshold tests in view of their practical effects and concludes that neither test is clearly superior. Part III proposes adoption of a per se rule with …

The Right To Financial Privacy Act Of 1978-The Congressional Response To United States V. Miller: A Procedural Right To Challenge Government Access To Financial Records, Nancy M. Kirschner

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This article will review the factors leading to the Miller decision and the legislative response to that decision. Part I will examine the bank customer's expectation of privacy and the way Miller affects this expectation. Part II will discuss the congressional response to Miller and the competing interests which led to the Right to Financial Privacy Act. The Act itself will be discussed in detail in Part III. Part IV will evaluate the Act, and offer recommendations for reform. The article concludes that the Act, by adopting a purely procedural approach, fails to provide adequate protection to bank customers.

Scope Of Disclosure Of Internal Revenue Communications And Information Files Under The Freedom Of Information Act, Peter R. Spanos

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This article will discuss the proper scope of disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act of the files and administrative and policy materials of the IRS, with particular attention to the following currently contested issues: (1) the extent to which IRS guideline documents and private letter rulings are subject to disclosure; (2) the proper scope of the FOIA exemption for "interagency or intra-agency memorandums or letters which would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency" as applied to the IRS; and (3) the scope of the exemption for "investigatory records …