Privacy Law Commons^™

Smart Homes: The Next Fourth Amendment Frontier, Christina A. Robinson

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

Under the third-party search doctrine, an individual does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in information he or she voluntarily discloses to third parties. “Always on” in-home technology creates recordings of unsuspecting consumers in their most intimate spaces and sends them to third party companies and their affiliates, which makes this information subject to warrantless search by law enforcement under the third- search doctrine. The third-party search doctrine is ill-suited to the digital age, where consumers are routinely required to volunteer information to third parties in order to access digital content. This Note suggests that a warrant should be …

Privacy Or The Polls: Public Voter Registration Laws As A Modern Form Of Vote Denial, Audrey Paige Sauer

William & Mary Law Review

On May 11, 2017, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order establishing the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity (PACEI), with the mission to “study the registration and voting processes used in Federal elections.” Pursuant to this mission, Vice Chair of the Commission, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, sent out letters to state election officials soliciting all “publicly available voter roll data,” including all registrants’ full first and last names, middle names or initials, addresses, dates of birth, political party, last four digits of Social Security numbers if available, voter history from 2006 onward, information regarding any felony …

Dna Is Different: An Exploration Of The Current Inadequacies Of Genetic Privacy Protection In Recreational Dna Databases, Jamie M. Zeevi

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Part I of this Note discusses the fundamental science behind DNA and defines and explains the process of familial DNA searching. Part I also discusses how Carpenter v. United States provides a framework to begin thinking about the unique nature of DNA and privacy implications for its use, and why the revealing nature of this type of data warrants protection. Part II of this Note delves into the lack of constitutional and statutory protections for DNA in recreational DNA databases. First, Part II explains that traditional Fourth Amendment concepts, like search warrants, probable cause, reasonable expectation of privacy, third-party …

Privacy As Safety, A. Michael Froomkin, Zak Colangelo

Washington Law Review

The idea that privacy makes you safer is unjustly neglected: public officials emphasize the dangers of privacy while contemporary privacy theorists acknowledge that privacy may have safety implications but hardly dwell on the point. We argue that this lack of emphasis is a substantive and strategic error and seek to rectify it. This refocusing is particularly timely given the proliferation of new and invasive technologies for the home and for consumer use more generally, not to mention surveillance technologies such as so-called smart cities.

Indeed, we argue—perhaps for the first time in modern conversations about privacy—that in many cases privacy …

Data And The Social Obligation Norm Of Property: An Essay In Honor Of Professor Gregory S. Alexander, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

In the age of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal and sundry other data breaches at Under Armour, Target, and Best Buy, the issue of security and privacy in consumer data has become increasingly important. For much of the modern era, the development of technology has gone relatively unchecked, with the United States having ceded much of the policymaking terrain to Silicon Valley. This has resulted in the unbridled creation of vast amounts of consumer data. Users who engage with tech platforms generate bits and bytes about themselves based on their activities, preferences, and habits. This information — “data” — is then …

Automation In Moderation, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

This Article assesses recent efforts to encourage online platforms to use automated means to prevent the dissemination of unlawful online content before it is ever seen or distributed. As lawmakers in Europe and around the world closely scrutinize platforms’ “content moderation” practices, automation and artificial intelligence appear increasingly attractive options for ridding the Internet of many kinds of harmful online content, including defamation, copyright infringement, and terrorist speech. Proponents of these initiatives suggest that requiring platforms to screen user content using automation will promote healthier online discourse and will aid efforts to limit Big Tech’s power.

In fact, however, the …

The Relationship Between Privacy Notice Formats And Consumer Disclosure Decisions: A Quantitative Study, Alexys Mercedes Carlton, David Cross

Publications

In the Data Era, the future success of many businesses will heavily depend on the business’ ability to collect and process consumer personal information. Business leaders must understand and implement practices that increase consumer trust to influence their willingness to disclose their information. The problem addressed by this study is many consumers do not trust online service providers with their personal information, and as a result, have refrained from engaging in online activities. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to understand how consumers use privacy notices when deciding to share their personal information with online businesses. A sample …

News As Surveillance, Erin C. Carroll

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As inhabitants of the Information Age, we are increasingly aware of the amount and kind of data that technology platforms collect on us. Far less publicized, however, is how much data news organizations collect on us as we read the news online and how they allow third parties to collect that personal data as well. A handful of studies by computer scientists reveal that, as a group, news websites are among the Internet’s worst offenders when it comes to tracking their visitors.

On the one hand, this surveillance is unsurprising. It is capitalism at work. The press’s business model has …

Privacy, Eavesdropping, And Wiretapping Across The United States: Reasonable Expectation Of Privacy And Judicial Discretion, Carol M. Bast

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

One-party consent and all-party consent eavesdropping and wiretapping statutes are two broad pathways for legislation to deal with the problem of secret taping and some states protect conversation under state constitutions. Whether a conversation is protected against being taped as a private conversation is often gauged by the reasonable expectation of privacy standard. Judges in both all-party consent and one-party consent jurisdictions have had to use their leeway under the reasonable expectation of privacy standard to arrive at what at the time seemed to be the most appropriate solution, perhaps in doing so creating a case law exception.

The Law Of The Tetrapods, Henry T. Greely

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Should there be such a thing as "Technology Law"? This Article explores that question in two ways. It first looks at four substantive issues that appear across many different areas of technology law: privacy, security, property, and responsibility. It then examines five questions that frequently recur about how to regulate very different new technologies. These questions include which agency should regulate, whether regulation should focus on before or after marketing, what jurisdiction should regulate, how relevant new information will be gained and used, and how-politically-good regulation can be enacted. This Article concludes that it may make sense to develop a …

Criminalizing Asylum: Dna Testing Asylum Seekers Violates Privacy Rights, Scarlett L. Montenegro

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Introduction.

On June 16, 2015, President Trump announced his 2016 presidential campaign and claimed that Mexicans are criminals who “[h]ave lots of problems . . . they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists . . . It’s coming from all over . . . Latin America.” President Trump has publicly expressed his hostility towards immigrants by calling them “animals” and blaming them for drugs and gangs in the United States. While in office, President Trump tweeted that immigrants were invading the United States and suggested that “we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from …

Do You Accept These Cookies? How The General Data Protection Regulation Keeps Consumer Information Safe, Jayne Chorpash

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Abstract:

This note examines the General Data Protection Regulation implemented in the EU in 2018. The GDPR was the result of a long history of data privacy laws that have been met with varying levels of success. While the GDPR has retained many characteristics that have made past privacy laws successful, it has also made some important changes. Most notably, the GDPR gives generous rights to consumers to guard and protect their data, which is of growing concern in light of how easy it is to share information in our modern age. Additionally, the GDPR has a much broader territorial …

Protecting Online Privacy In The Digital Age: Carpenter V. United States And The Fourth Amendment’S Third-Party Doctrine, Cristina Del Rosso, Carol M. Bast

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

The goal of this paper is to examine the future of the third-party doctrine with the proliferation of technology and the online data we are surrounded with daily, specifically after the Supreme Court’s decision in Carpenter v. United States. It is imperative that individuals do not forfeit their Constitutional guarantees for the benefit of living in a technologically advanced society. This requires an understanding of the modern-day functional equivalents of “papers” and “effects.”

Looking to the future, this paper contemplates solutions on how to move forward in this technology era by scrutinizing the relevancy of the third-party doctrine due …

A New Frontier Facing Attorneys And Paralegals: The Promise & Challenges Of Artificial Intelligence As Applied To Law & Legal Decision-Making, Marissa Moran

Publications and Research

Artificial Intelligence/AI invisibly navigates and informs our lives today and may also be used to determine a client’s legal fate. Through executive order, statements by a U.S. Supreme Court justice and a Congressional Commission on AI, all three branches of the United States government have addressed the use of AI to resolve societal and legal matters. Pursuant to the American Bar Association Model Rules of Professional Conduct[i] and New York Rules of Professional Conduct (NYRPC), [ii] the legal profession recognizes the need for competency in technology which requires both substantive knowledge of law and competent use of technology for …

Zoning For Families, Sara C. Bronin

Indiana Law Journal

Is a group of eight unrelated adults and three children living together and sharing meals, household expenses, and responsibilities—and holding themselves out to the world to have long-term commitments to each other—a family? Not according to most zoning codes—including that of Hartford, Connecticut, where the preceding scenario presented itself a few years ago. Zoning, which is the local regulation of land use, almost always defines family, limiting those who may live in a dwelling unit to those who satisfy the zoning code’s definition. Often times, this definition is drafted in a way that excludes many modern living arrangements and preferences. …

Politics Of Adversarial Machine Learning, Kendra Albert, Jonathon Penney, Bruce Schneier, Ram Shankar Siva Kumar

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In addition to their security properties, adversarial machine-learning attacks and defenses have political dimensions. They enable or foreclose certain options for both the subjects of the machine learning systems and for those who deploy them, creating risks for civil liberties and human rights. In this paper, we draw on insights from science and technology studies, anthropology, and human rights literature, to inform how defenses against adversarial attacks can be used to suppress dissent and limit attempts to investigate machine learning systems. To make this concrete, we use real-world examples of how attacks such as perturbation, model inversion, or membership inference …

Identity Manipulation: Responding To Advances In Artificial Intelligence And Robotics, Suzie Dunn

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics technologies have destabilized our ability to control our identity. Today, it is increasingly accessible for the average person to appropriate the voice, image, and body of another individual through the use of technology. Deepfake videos swap new faces into existing videos, facial re-enactment allows for the face of one person to be superimposed on the face of someone else in a real time video, artificial speech synthesis can clone another person’s voice, and 3D printing and modern robotics can reproduce life-size copies of living people. These are all examples of the ways technology …

Reconciling U.S. Banking And Securities Data Preservation Rules With European Mandatory Data Erasure Under Gdpr, Ronald V. Distante

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

United States law, which requires financial institutions to retain customer data, conflicts with European Union law, which requires financial institutions to delete customer data on demand. A financial institution operating transnationally cannot comply with both U.S. and EU law. Financial institutions thus face the issue that they cannot possibly delete and retain the same data simultaneously. This Note will clarify the scope and nature of this conflict.

First, it will clarify the conflict by examining (1) the relevant laws, which are Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act, and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations, (2) …

The Healthcare Privacy-Artificial Intelligence Impasse, Charlotte A. Tschider

Faculty Publications & Other Works

With the advent of the Internet, wireless technologies, advanced computing, and, ultimately, the integration of mobile devices into patient care, medical device technologies have revolutionized the healthcare sector. What once was a highly personal, one-to-one relationship between physician and patient has now been expanded, including medical device manufacturers, third party healthcare system providers, even physician-as-a-service for interpreting the data complex systems churn out. The introduction of technology to the healthcare field has, at an ever-increasing rate, transformed human health management.

Reworking privacy commitments in an AI world is an important endeavor. It may mean that we reconceptualize what these rights …

Saving America’S Privacy Rights: Why Carpenter V. United States Was Wrongly Decided And Why Courts Should Be Promoting Legislative Reform Rather Than Extending Existing Privacy Jurisprudence, David Stone

St. Mary's Law Journal

Privacy rights are under assault, but the Supreme Court’s judicial intervention into the issue, starting with Katz v. United States and leading to the Carpenter v. United States decision has created an inconsistent, piecemeal common law of privacy that forestalls a systematic public policy resolution by Congress and the states. In order to reach a satisfactory and longlasting resolution of the problem consistent with separation of powers principles, the states should consider a constitutional amendment that reduces the danger of pervasive technologyaided surveillance and monitoring, together with a series of statutes addressing each new issue posed by technological change as …

United States V. Touset, Katelyn James

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Transfixed In The Camera's Gaze: Foster V. Svenson And The Battle Of Privacy And Modern Art, Michael Goodyear

Articles & Chapters

The battle between First Amendment expression and privacy interests in twenty-first century America is in full force. In Foster v. Svenson, a photographer used a high-powered camera to take snapshots of his neighbors. The New York court ruled that it was art and therefore immune from New York’s privacy statute. Constrained by New York’s ineffective privacy statute, the court’s ruling included a cry for the New York legislature to act.

Privacy has become an increasingly powerful right in American law, especially with the growth of technology. Yet the problem with Foster and the New York statute is that the sole …

The Invalidation Of The Eu-Us Privacy Shield And The Future Of Transatlantic Data Flows: Testimony Of Professor Neil Richards Before The United States Senate, Neil M. Richards

Scholarship@WashULaw

This is the prepared testimony and statement for the records, including responses to questions for the record of Professor Neil Richards before the United States Senate Commerce Committee on December 9, 2020. The testimony explains that while Congress has failed to pass a comprehensive privacy bill despite many opportunities, the judgment of the European Court of Justice in Data Protection Commissioner v. Facebook, (commonly known as “Schrems 2”) represents a real opportunity for it to do just that in the near future. The testimony argues first that Congress should not just pass a comprehensive privacy bill, but one that gets …

Privacy's Constitutional Moment And The Limits Of Data Protection, Neil M. Richards, Woodrow Hartzog

Scholarship@WashULaw

America’s privacy bill has come due. Since the dawn of the Internet, Congress has repeatedly failed to build a robust identity for American privacy law. But now both California and the European Union have forced Congress’s hand by passing the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These data protection frameworks, structured around principles for Fair Information Processing called the “FIPs,” have industry and privacy advocates alike clamoring for a “U.S. GDPR.” States seemed poised to blanket the country with FIP-based laws if Congress fails to act. The United States is thus in the midst …

A Relational Turn For Data Protection?, Neil M. Richards, Woodrow Hartzog

Scholarship@WashULaw

While most approaches to privacy and data protection focus on the data, this paper explores an alternative approach that focuses on relationships. This means looking more closely at how the people who are exposing their information and the people that are inviting that disclosure relate to each other. It is concerned with what powerful parties owe to vulnerable parties–not just with their personal information, but with the things they see, the things they can click, and the decisions that are made about them. It’s less about the nature of data and more about the nature of power. And it can …

Welcome To Cordell Perspectives, Neil M. Richards, Jonathan W. Heusel

Scholarship@WashULaw

The world around us is changing. Let’s talk about it together. Introducing a series of articles and opinions by the world’s leading experts concerning COVID-19 as it relates to precision medicine and data privacy: Welcome to Cordell Perspectives.

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.

Closed Adoption: An Illusory Promise To Birth Parents And The Changing Landscape Of Sealed Adoption Records, Bryn Baffer

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Imagine spitting into a tube and mailing your DNA off only to discover that you had a sibling who had been adopted by another family or that a parent’s affair had resulted in a half-sibling. For many individuals, these family secrets have been exposed due to direct-to-consumer DNA testing companies, such as 23andMe.

By the 1950s, most states had enacted statutes that sealed adoption record files in order to preserve the privacy of the birth parents, adoptees, and adoptive families. While some states have moved toward granting adoptees access to their adoption records, most states still have some type of …

Bipa: The Most Important Biometric Privacy Law In The Us?, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

In May 2020, Clearview AI abruptly ended all service contracts with all non-law enforcement entities based in Illinois. The reason? It hoped to avoid an injunction and potentially large damages under one of the most important privacy laws in America: the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).

Cyber Mobs, Disinformation, And Death Videos: The Internet As It Is (And As It Should Be), Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

Fiction and visual representations can alter our understanding of human experiences and struggles. They help us understand human frailties and suffering in a visceral way. Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel Sabrina does that in spades. In Sabrina, a woman is murdered by a misogynist, and a video of her execution is leaked. Conspiracy theorists deem her murder a hoax. A cyber mob smears the woman’s loved ones as crisis actors, posts death threats, and spreads their personal information. The attacks continue until a shooting massacre redirects the cyber mob’s wrath to other mourners. Sabrina captures the breathtaking velocity of disinformation online …