Science and Technology Law Commons^™

Data Privacy, Human Rights, And Algorithmic Opacity, Sylvia Lu

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Decades ago, it was difficult to imagine a reality in which artificial intelligence (AI) could penetrate every corner of our lives to monitor our innermost selves for commercial interests. Within just a few decades, the private sector has seen a wild proliferation of AI systems, many of which are more powerful and penetrating than anticipated. In many cases, AI systems have become “the power behind the throne,” tracking user activities and making fateful decisions through predictive analysis of personal information. Despite the growing power of AI, proprietary algorithmic systems can be technically complex, legally claimed as trade secrets, and managerially …

Use Of Unmanned Aircraft Systems And Regulatory Landscape: Unravelling The Future Challenges In The High Sky, K Kirthan Shenoy, Divya Tyagi

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

The individuals on the ground nowadays often observe objects distantly hover over the sky, which raises the question of who might be operating the object or what the object might record. Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) or Drones today have quickly penetrated civilian, military, and commercial sectors. The drones or UAS, with the advancement of technology, are now capable of traversing long distances, having long endurance, and having multipurpose functionality. The UAS industry is fast expanding, with trade investment touching the billion-dollar mark in flourishing economies. The advent of the Covid 19 pandemic saw a steep rise in the use of …

Moonshots, Matthew Wansley

Articles

In the last half-century, technological progress has stagnated. Rapid advances in information technology disguise the slow pace of productivity growth in other fields. Reigniting technological progress may require firms to invest in moonshots—long-term projects to commercialize innovations. Yet all but a few giant tech firms shy away from moonshots, even when the expected returns would justify the investment. The root of the problem is corporate structure. The process of developing a novel technology does not generate the kind of interim feedback that shareholders need to monitor managers and managers need to motivate employees. Managers who anticipate these agency problems invest …

Steering Loan Modifications Post-Pandemic, Pamela Foohey, Dalie Jimenez, Christopher K. Odinet

Articles

As part of federal and state relief programs created during the COVID-19 pandemic, many American households received pauses on their largest debts, particularly on mortgages and student loans. Others may have come to agreements with their lenders, likewise pausing or altering payment on other debts, such as auto loans and credit cards. This relief allowed households to allocate their savings and income to necessary expenses, like groceries, utilities, and medicine. But forbearance does not equal forgiveness. At the end of the various relief periods and moratoria, people will have to resume paying all their debts, the amounts of which may …

Adversarial Scrutiny Of Evidentiary Statistical Software, Rediet Abebe, Moritz Hardt, Angela Jin, John Miller, Ludwig Schmidt, Rebecca Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. criminal legal system increasingly relies on software output to convict and incarcerate people. In a large number of cases each year, the government makes these consequential decisions based on evidence from statistical software — such as probabilistic genotyping, environmental audio detection and toolmark analysis tools — that the defense counsel cannot fully cross-examine or scrutinize. This undermines the commitments of the adversarial criminal legal system, which relies on the defense’s ability to probe and test the prosecution’s case to safeguard individual rights.

Responding to this need to adversarially scrutinize output from such software, we propose robust adversarial testing …

Submission To The Province Of Nova Scotia On Its Review Of The Intimate Images And Cyber-Protection Act - Leaf, Suzie Dunn, Rosel Kim

Reports & Public Policy Documents

The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) commends the Nova Scotia government for reviewing its Intimate Images and Cyber-protection Act (the Act) and seeking public input for this review. Nova Scotia has been, and continues to be, a leader in Canada for its role in advancing innovative laws and supports for people targeted by technology-facilitated violence (TFV), digital abuse, and the non-consensual distribution of intimate images (NCDII). As these forms of harmful behaviour evolve and become better understood, it is important to revisit this legislation to assess whether it is providing meaningful and accessible responses to such serious social …

Regulation Of Health-Related Artificial Intelligence In Medical Devices: The Canadian Story, Michael Da Silva, Colleen M. M. Flood, Matthew Herder

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Artificial Intelligence (AI) may transform Canadian healthcare. The hope is that AI will enable more accurate and efficient care, thereby solving many access, quality, and safety problems. Yet, despite this tantalizing prospect, there are risks of unsafe AI harming patients, algorithmic bias, and threats to privacy. This work begins analysis of whether applicable Canadian laws are up to the task of ensuring Canadians can benefit from effective health-related AI while minimizing AI-related risks. It focuses on Health Canada’s regulation of medical devices, a ‘first line of defence’ that decides which devices are safe, effective, and thus permitted for trade in …

Reducing Barriers To Accessing Administrative Data On Sars-Cov-2 Vaccination For Research, Andrew Mcrae, Patrick Archambault, Patrick Fok, Hana Wiemer, Laurie Morrison, Matthew Herder

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Public trust in scientific research, especially research regarding vaccines, has proven fragile during the COVID-19 pandemic. To counter abundant misinformation about SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, rigorous, ongoing evaluations of vaccine safety and effectiveness by independent Canadian researchers are important. However, researchers' efforts to conduct timely, national studies of vaccine effectiveness have been hindered by barriers to data sharing that have made it difficult to integrate patients' vaccination status into SARS-CoV-2 clinical and epidemiological studies. Here, McRae et al discuss how a risk-averse data-sharing culture has led to missed opportunities to conduct robust, timely, pan-Canadian SARS-CoV-2 clinical and vaccine effectiveness studies, and outline …

Understanding Chilling Effects, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

With digital surveillance and censorship on the rise, the amount of data available online unprecedented, and corporate and governmental actors increasingly employing emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and facial recognition technology (FRT) for surveillance and data analytics, concerns about “chilling effects”, that is, the capacity for these activities “chill” or deter people from exercising their rights and freedoms have taken on greater urgency and importance. Yet, there remains a clear dearth in systematic theoretical and empirical work point. This has left significant gaps in understanding. This article has attempted to fill that void, synthesizing theoretical and empirical …

Platforms, Encryption, And The Cfaa: The Case Of Whatsapp V Nso Group, Jonathon Penney, Bruce Schneier

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

End-to-end encryption technology has gone mainstream. But this wider use has led hackers, cybercriminals, foreign governments, and other threat actors to employ creative and novel attacks to compromise or workaround these protections, raising important questions as to how the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the primary federal anti-hacking statute, is best applied to these new encryption implementations. Now, after the Supreme Court recently narrowed the CFAA’s scope in Van Buren and suggested it favors a code-based approach to liability under the statute, understanding how best to theorize sophisticated code-based access barriers like end-to-end encryption, and their circumvention, is now …

Empirical Evidence On Robot Taxation: Literature Review And Technical Analysis, Bret N. Bogenschneider

American University Business Law Review

The literature on robot taxation has continued to expand since 2018 with numerous articles now referring to empirical evidence. The evidence presented in prior studies comprises abstract modeling and statistical pattern reviews with no statistically significant findings reported to date. Notably, one article is an advocacy piece by a tech lobbyist who at one point purchased priority Google results for the search "robot taxation." In some cases, technical errors are sufficient to reverse the stated results. Examples of error in empirical analyses include (i) motivated reasoning, such as the failure to model simpler or best explanations; (ii) lack of causal …

Blockchain Disruption: Digital Assets Are Changing How We Do Business, Nick Curley

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Digital assets are changing the way businesses think about equity, labor, business models, and business organization. Digital assets, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, provide incredible opportunities to further align shareholders with the objectives of the entity.

Each time humanity advances its technology for ledgers, markets explode, and we witness immense wealth creation. Digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum are the next great step forward for ledger technology. While there are incredible opportunities to leverage this new technology, there are also incredible risks. There are many public examples of “hacks” of prominent blockchains like Ethereum and Solana. Blockchain technology has captured the …

The Wild West Of Data Privacy: Why Rhode Island Needs To Enact Comprehensive Legislation To Protect Consumers’ Data, Candace Quinn

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.