Privacy Law Commons^™

Killing New Vistas With The Over-Regulation Of Recreational 'Drone' Use, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In the last few years, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of remote-controlled copters – often given the convenient but misleading epithets of unmanned aerial vehicles or “drones” – by recreational users to capture aerial photographs and videos on an unprecedented scale. Asia is no exception. The convergence of cutting-edge technological developments in gyroscopic gimbals, long-range wireless transmissions, GPS-enabled stabilisation, GPS-enabled flightpath-preprogramming, first-person-views, and compact digital imaging has led to the proliferation of affordable camera-carrying “drones” that even hobbyists can pilot with reasonable safety. Thus far, despite purported controversies there have not been any reports of serious …

Data Breaches And Privacy Law: Lawyers’ Challenges In Handling Personal Information, Charlotte Duc-Bragues

Cornell Law School J.D. Student Research Papers

Sharing personal information with a lawyer potentially represents the greatest source of vulnerability for an individual. Since the first major security breach in 2005, law firms have been pressed both by public authorities and clients to take action in order to protect confidential information from potential harmful breaches.

This paper seeks to provide an overview of the challenges faced by lawyers in handling personal information with regard to potential security breaches. The aim is to analyze this issue through the focal of privacy law; statistics on security breaches and tools to prevent this phenomenon, extensively studied in class, are given …

A Closer Look At Bowers V. Hardwick: State And Federal Decisions Concerning Sexual Privacy And Equal Protection, Jonathan Tatun

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Habeas Data: Comparative Constitutional Interventions From Latin America Against Neoliberal States Of Insecurity And Surveillance, Marc Tizoc Gonzalez

Chicago-Kent Law Review

To cultivate the next twenty years of LatCrit theory, praxis, and community, the afterword looks back to LatCrit’s Critical Global Classroom (2003–04) (CGC), an ABA-accredited summer study-abroad program. The CGC invited U.S. law students to study comparative constitutionalism, law and society, and truth and reconciliation movements while sojourning Chile, Argentina, and South Africa under the question: “Shall the recent history of the Global South become the imminent fate of the Global North?” While enrolled in the 2004 CGC, the author learned about the extraordinary constitutional writ of habeas data, which various Latin American countries adopted as they reconstituted their …

Spies In The Skies: Dirtboxes And Airplane Electronic Surveillance, Brian L. Owsley

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Electronic surveillance in the digital age is essentially a cat-and-mouse game between governmental agencies that are developing new techniques and technologies for surveillance, juxtaposed against privacy rights advocates who voice concerns about such technologies. In November 2014, there was a discovery of a new twist on a relatively old theme. Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Marshals Service was running a surveillance program employing devices—dirtboxes—that gather all cell phone numbers in the surrounding area. Other federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Agency, Immigration and Custom Enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security, are also documented to have …

Are They Worth Reading? An In-Depth Analysis Of Online Trackers’ Privacy Policies, Candice Hoke, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Pedro Giovanni Leon, Alyssa Au

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

We analyzed the privacy policies of 75 online tracking companies with the goal of assessing whether they contain information relevant for users to make privacy decisions. We compared privacy policies from large companies, companies that are members of self-regulatory organizations, and nonmember companies and found that many of them are silent with regard to important consumer-relevant practices including the collection and use of sensitive information and linkage of tracking data with personally-identifiable information. We evaluated these policies against self-regulatory guidelines and found that many policies are not fully compliant. Furthermore, the overly general requirements established in those guidelines allow companies …

Aclu V. Clapper: The Fourth Amendment In The Digital Age, Erin E. Connare

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Social Origins Of The Personality Torts, Samantha Barbas

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Small Data Surveillance V. Big Data Cybersurveillance, Margaret Hu

Faculty Publications

This Article highlights some of the critical distinctions between small data surveillance and big data cybersurveillance as methods of intelligence gathering. Specifically, in the intelligence context, it appears that "collect-it-all" tools in a big data world can now potentially facilitate the construction, by the intelligence community, of other individuals' digital avatars. The digital avatar can be understood as a virtual representation of our digital selves and may serve as a potential proxy for an actual person. This construction may be enabled through processes such as the data fusion of biometric and biographic data, or the digital data fusion of the …

Tort, Speech, And The Dubious Alchemy Of State Action, Cristina Carmody Tilley

Faculty Publications

Plaintiffs have historically used private law torts like defamation, privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress to vindicate their dignitary interests. But fifty years ago in New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court took an unprecedented approach to state action doctrine in order to recast these causes of action as public-private law hybrids that explicitly privileged speech over dignity. In constitutional challenges to private law disputes, the Court had for decades defined the state action under review to include just the contested verdict at issue. In Sullivan, it broke with that practice and defined the relevant state action to …

The Privacies Of Life: Automatic License Plate Recognition Is Unconstitutional Under The Mosaic Theory Of Fourth Amendment Privacy Law, Jessica Gutierrez-Alm

Hamline Law Review

Abstract

The 4th Amendment To The U.S. Constitution, Article 3 Of The Ala Code Of Ethics, And Section 215 Of The Usa Patriot Act: Squaring The Triangle, Sue Ann Gardner

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Presentations

Librarians in the United States have many professional guideposts to inform their work. A patron's right to privacy is one tenet that tends to be upheld tenaciously, and is informed first by the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, among other Amendments, as well as Article III of the American Library Association Code of Ethics. Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the so-called "library provision," contradicts both the 4th Amendment and Article III of the ALA Code of Ethics, making it a weak third leg of a triangle of guideposts. The speaker explains how Section 215 allows for confiscation …

Public Records In Private Devices: How Public Employees' Article I, Section 7 Privacy Rights Create A Dilemma For State And Local Government, Philip Paine

Washington Law Review

The Washington Public Records Act (PRA or “the Act”) is a wide-ranging law that heavily weighs in favor of public disclosure of government processes. Initially enacted as a citizen initiative in 1972, the Act has many beneficial uses. For example, it provides insight into a local government’s decision-making process and ensures that citizens have access to their own government. However, the PRA’s potential to be used to invade personal privacy raises significant constitutional concerns. When an employee in possession of a public record invokes the protection of article I, section 7 of the Washington State Constitution, which protects an individual’s …

Show And Tell?: Students' Personal Lives, Schools, And Parents, Emily Gold Waldman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Public schools learn about their students' personal lives in many ways. Some are passive: a teacher observes a student kissing someone, or overhears a conversation among friends. But schools also engage in more active information-gathering about students' personal lives, through surveys and informal conversations between students and teachers, administrators, school psychologists, counselors, coaches, and other personnel. This Article explores the competing privacy considerations that result from such encounters. Once schools have learned highly personal information about their students, does it violate those students' privacy rights to disclose that information to their parents? Or does keeping the information secret violate the …

The Federalist Provenance Of The Principle Of Privacy, Elvin T. Lim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The right to privacy is the centerpiece of modern liberal constitutional thought in the United States. But liberals rarely invoke “the Founding” to justify this right, as if conceding that the right to privacy was somehow a radical departure from “original meaning,” perhaps pulled out of the hat by “activist” judges taking great interpretive liberties with the constitutional text. Far from being an unorthodox and modern invention, I argue here that privacy is a principle grounded in the very architecture of the Constitution as enumerated in its Articles, perhaps even more so than in particular sections of the Bill of …

The Need To Criminalize Revenge Porn: How A Law Protecting Victims Can Avoid Running Afoul Of The First Amendment, Adrienne N. Kitchen

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Revenge porn occurs when someone posts sexually explicit images of their former paramour on the web, often with contact information for the victim’s work and home. There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of victims. Victims lose or quit their jobs; they are harassed by strangers; some change their name or alter their appearance. Some victims resort to suicide; others are stalked, assaulted, or killed. Civil suits fail to remove the images or deter perpetrators. Current criminal laws are insufficient in several common instances. These shortcomings mean there is a need to criminalize revenge porn.

Revenge porn is obscene and …

Reviving The Privacy Protection Act Of 1980, Elizabeth B. Uzelac

Northwestern University Law Review

The federal privacy legislative scheme is composed of a fragmented patchwork of aging sector-specific statutes—many enacted prior to the advent of the home computer—that supplement the Fourth Amendment to regulate government access to information. The Privacy Protection Act of 1980 is one such statute, though few understand or utilize its protections. The Act prohibits law enforcement officials from searching for or seizing information from people who disseminate information to the public, such as reporters. Where it applies, the Act requires law enforcement officials to instead rely on compliance with a subpoena or the target’s voluntary cooperation to gain access to …

Mug Shot Disclosure Under Foia: Does Privacy Or Public Interest Prevail?, Kathryn Shephard

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is There Anybody Out There? Analyzing The Regulation Of Children’S Privacy Online In The United States Of America And The European Union According To The Tbgi Analytical Framework By Eberlein Et Al, Nachshon Goltz

Transnational Business Governance Interactions Working Papers

This article analyzes the regulation of children’s privacy online, especially in the context of personal information collection as a commodity, in the United States of America (USA) and the European Union (EU) according to the Transnational Business Governance Interactions analytical framework proposed by Eberlein et al. This article reviews the regulatory structure of the field in these two jurisdictions, including global organizations, according to Elberlein et al components and questions. In the analysis, a map of the regulatory interactions within this global realm will be presented and discussed. Analysis of the influence of each interacting party and the degree of …

Kermit Gosnell’S Babies: Abortion, Infanticide And Looking Beyond The Masks Of The Law, Richard F. Duncan

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

If, as Laurence Tribe has observed, “all law tells a story,” this Article tells two stories occurring forty years apart—the story of Justice Harry Blackmun and the unborn human beings he covered with the legal mask of “potential” lives in Roe v. Wade in 1973, and the story of Doctor Kermit Gosnell and the unmasked babies he was convicted of murdering in his Philadelphia abortion clinic in 2013. As Professor Tribe also observes, these stories amount to “a clash of absolutes, of life against liberty,” and therefore they are stories that must be told time and again, until we get …

Spying Inc., Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

The latest spying craze is the “stalking app.” Once installed on someone’s cell phone, the stalking app provides continuous access to the person’s calls, texts, snap chats, photos, calendar updates, and movements. Domestic abusers and stalkers frequently turn to stalking apps because they are undetectable even to sophisticated phone owners.

Business is booming for stalking app providers, even though their entire enterprise is arguably illegal. Federal and state wiretapping laws ban the manufacture, sale, or advertisement of devices knowing their design makes them primarily useful for the surreptitious interception of electronic communications. But those laws are rarely, if ever, …

Privacy, Autonomy, And Internet Platforms, Frank A. Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sharing Shortcoming, Derek E. Bambauer

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Current cybersecurity policy emphasizes increasing the sharing of threat and vulnerability information. Legal reform is seen as crucial to enabling this exchange, both within the public and private sectors and between them. Information sharing is due for some skepticism though, and this Essay (part of a symposium entitled Privacy in a Data Collection Society) attempts to provide it. Not only are there few real legal barriers to data exchange, but greater sharing will generate little benefit and will create significant privacy risks. This Essay creates a typography of vertical and horizontal information sharing, and argues that while top-down communication could …

Reforming The Law Of Reputation, Frank A. Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

Unfair and deceptive practices of controllers and processors of data have adversely affected many citizens. New threats to individuals’ reputations have seriously undermined the efficacy of extant regulation concerning health privacy, credit reporting, and expungement. The common thread is automated, algorithmic arrangements of information, which could render data properly removed or obscured in one records system, nevertheless highly visible or dominant in other, more important ones.

As policymakers reform the law of reputation, they should closely consult European approaches to what is now called the “right to be forgotten.” Health privacy law, credit reporting, and criminal conviction expungement need to …

Corporate Avatars And The Erosion Of The Populist Fourth Amendment, Avidan Cover

Faculty Publications

The current state of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence leaves it to technology corporations to challenge court orders, subpoenas, and requests by the government for individual users’ information. The third-party doctrine denies people a reasonable expectation of privacy in data they transmit through telecommunications and Internet service providers. Third-party corporations become, by default, the people’s corporate avatars. Corporate avatars, however, do a poor job of representing individuals’ interests. Moreover, vesting the Fourth Amendment’s government-oversight functions in corporations fails to cohere with the Bill of Rights’ populist history and the Framers’ distrust of corporations.

This article examines how the third-party doctrine proves unsupportable …

Exploration And Exploitation: An Essay On (Machine) Learning, Algorithms, And Information Provision, Deven Desai

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Legal and regulatory understandings of information provision miss the importance of the exploration-exploitation dynamic. This Essay argues that is a mistake and seeks to bring this perspective to the debate about information provision and competition. A general, ongoing problem for an individual or an organization is whether to stay with a familiar solution to a problem or try new options that may yield better results. Work in organizational learning describes this problem as the exploration-exploitation dilemma. Understanding and addressing that dilemma has become a key part of an algorithmic approach to computation, machine learning, as it is applied to information …

Debatable Premises In Telecom Policy, 31 J. Marshall J. Info. Tech. & Privacy L. 453 (2015), Justin (Gus) Hurwitz, Roslyn Layton

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

The five premises that this paper considers are:

1. Everyone needs low-cost access to high speed broadband service

2. High-speed broadband is necessary for education, health, government, and other social services

3. Wireless can‟t compete with cable

4. An open Internet is necessary for innovation and necessarily benefits consumers

5. Telecommunications are better somewhere else.

The Law And 3d Printing, 31 J. Marshall J. Info. Tech. & Privacy L. 505 (2015), Jasper Tran

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

Recent years have seen extraordinary growth in the amount of legal scholarship and practice at the intersection of law and 3D printing. To help navigate this emerging field of 3D printing law, I created the accompanying Law and 3D Printing Bibliography. The published bibliography presented herein contains over 100 entries. The brief introductory comments to the published piece discuss the creation and contents of the bibliography, and provide suggestions for where one should begin their research in the area. The comments focus on (1) 3D printing‘s background, (2) historical growth pattern of law and 3D printing scholarship, (3) identification of …

Legal Problems In Data Management: It & Privacy At The Forefront: Opening Remarks, 31 J. Marshall J. Info. Tech. & Privacy L. 521 (2015)

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

No abstract provided.

Selected State Laws Governing The Safeguarding And Disposing Of Personal Information, 31 J. Marshall J. Info. Tech. & Privacy L. 487 (2015), Bruce Radke, Michael Waters

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

Numerous states have adopted laws mandating the protection and disposal of personal information. Under those laws, businesses are required to implement and maintain reasonable security procedures and practices appropriate to the nature of the information in order to protect the personal information from unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification, or disclosure. Although the definition of “personal information” varies from state to state, “personal information” is generally defined as an individual’s first name or initial and last name in combination with any one or more of the following data elements, when either the name or the data elements are not encrypted or …