Internet Law Commons^™

Data Transmission And Energy Efficient Internet Data Centers, Joseph R. Briscar

American University Law Review

The internet is a marvel of human accomplishment and a feat of technological engineering, which allows nearly instantaneous communication across the globe-an act once considered the stuff of science fiction. It has been lauded for its environmental benefits, such as reducing paper production and waste, but, as with any great accomplishment, there are unintended consequences. The increased proliferation of electronic devices to access the internet and the exponential advancement of those devices results in large amounts of electronic waste-a problem in its own right. Compounding the issue, for all of those internet-enabled devices to work, they must rely on the …

Protecting Privacy In The Era Of Smart Toys: Does Hello Barbie Have A Duty To Report, Corinne Moini

Law Student Publications

“‘Yay, you’re here!’ Barbie said eagerly. ‘This is so exciting. What’s your name?’…’I just know we’re going to be great friends.’” With a simple greeting, Hello Barbie has infiltrated your child’s life. Each time your child wishes to engage, they simply press on Barbie’s belt buckle and speak. Unlike other talking toys, the button on Barbie’s belt is not to play one of the pre-recorded statements that are installed in the toy. Instead, the button is used to record and transmit what your child says to an online storage cloud where it will be reviewed and used to create an …

Substantiating Big Data In Health Care, Nathan Cortez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Predictive analytics and "big data" are emerging as important new tools for diagnosing and treating patients. But as data collection becomes more pervasive, and as machine learning and analytical methods become more sophisticated, the companies that traffic in health-related big data will face competitive pressures to make more aggressive claims regarding what their programs can predict. Already, patients, practitioners, and payors are inundated with claims that software programs, "apps," and other forms of predictive analytics can help solve some of the health care system's most pressing problems. This article considers the evidence and substantiation that we should require of these …

Conceptualizing Cryptolaw, Carla L. Reyes

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Sweden transfers its real property recording system to the blockchain, a software protocol that enables public, cryptographically secure transaction verification without reliance upon a trusted third party. Dubai plans to issue blockchain-based government documents. The United States Department of Health and Human Services investigates blockchain-based systems for managing health data. Illinois explores blockchain-based applications for use in the Illinois government. News of governments and public-private partnerships developing blockchain-based legal applications increasingly splash across the headlines; however the law-makers using blockchain and other Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) systems to implement legal processes do not systematically consider the broader implications of their …

Entrepreneurial Administration, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

A core failing of today’s administrative state and modern administrative law scholarship is the lack of imagination as to how agencies should operate. On the conventional telling, public agencies follow specific grants of regulatory authority, use the traditional tools of notice-and-comment rulemaking and adjudication, and are checked by judicial review. In reality, however, effective administration depends on entrepreneurial leadership that spearheads policy experimentation and trial-and-error problem-solving, including the development of regulatory programs that use non-traditional tools.

Entrepreneurial administration takes place both at public agencies and private entities, each of which can address regulatory challenges and earn regulatory authority as a …

Making News: Balancing Newsworthiness And Privacy In The Age Of Algorithms, Erin C. Carroll

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In deciding privacy lawsuits against media defendants, courts have for decades deferred to the media. They have given it wide berth to determine what is newsworthy and so, what is protected under the First Amendment. And in doing so, they have often spoken reverently of the editorial process and journalistic decision-making.

Yet, in just the last several years, news production and consumption has changed dramatically. As we get more of our news from digital and social media sites, the role of information gatekeeper is shifting from journalists to computer engineers, programmers, and app designers. The algorithms that the latter write …

Paying For Privacy And The Personal Data Economy, Stacy-Ann Elvy

Articles & Chapters

Growing demands for privacy and increases in the quantity and variety of consumer data have engendered various business offerings to allow companies, and in some instances consumers, to capitalize on these developments. One such example is the emerging “personal data economy” (PDE) in which companies, such as Datacoup, purchase data directly from individuals. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the “pay-for-privacy” (PFP) model requires consumers to pay an additional fee to prevent their data from being collected and mined for advertising purposes. This Article conducts a simultaneous in-depth exploration of the impact of burgeoning PDE and PFP models. It …

Reshaping Ability Grouping Through Big Data, Yoni H. Carmel, Tammy H. Ben-Shahar

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

This Article examines whether incorporating data mining technologies in education can promote equality. Following many other spheres in life, big data technologies that include creating, collecting, and analyzing vast amounts of data about individuals are increasingly being used in schools. This process has already elicited widespread interest among scholars, parents, and the public at large. However, this attention has largely focused on aspects of student privacy and data protection and has overlooked the profound effects data mining may have on educational equality. This Article analyzes the effects of data mining on education equality by focusing on one educational practice--ability grouping--that …

Consumer Internet Standard Form Contracts In India: A Proposal, Robert A. Hillman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

India's burgeoning Internet commerce sector has made consumers susceptible to standard-form contracts. Due to the slim likelihood of consumers reading the terms, vendors may often draft heavy-handed terms in the contracts, thereby adversely impacting consumer interests. The Indian legal framework in this regard is inadequate. This article evaluates the existing suggestions on standard-form contracts and argues that none of them safeguard consumer interests sufficiently. Instead, based on the American Law Institutes' Principles of the Law of Software Contracts, the article proposes a disclosure approach that would benefit the interests of Indian consumers engaged in commerce on the Internet.

Strategic Law Avoidance Using The Internet: A Short History, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

We are now some twenty years into the story of the Internet's bold challenge to law and the legal system. In the early 2000s, Jack Goldsmith and I wrote Who Controls the Internet, a book that might be understood as a chronicle of some the early and more outlandish stages of the story. Professors Pollman and Barry's excellent article, Regulatory Entrepreneurship, adds to and updates that story with subsequent chapters and a sophisticated analysis of the strategies more recently employed to avoid law using the Internet in some way. While Pollman and Barry's article stands on its own, …

War In The Expanse: The Metaphysics Of Cyberspace, Roy Balleste

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Do They Want To Regulate Online Profiling?, Laura Garcia Vargas

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Online profiling or behavioural tracking is the process by which private companies track and gather data about users’ activities in online platforms. The data collected by all the companies is aggregated with the purpose of creating a comprehensive profile about users. Since at least 15 years ago, there have been several attempts to regulate online profiling in order to reduce its privacy implications. In general, these regulations have tried to limit the way the information is used, the type of data that is collected, and impose or suggest the security standards that the companies should take to protect it.

This …

A Whole New Meaning To Having Our Head In The Clouds: Voice Recognition Technology, The Transmission Of Our Oral Communications To The Cloud And The Ability Of Canadian Law To Protect Us From The Dangers It Presents, Sarit K. Mizrahi

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Voice recognition technology is now included in modern devices as a matter of course, being used in anything from our cellular telephones, to our televisions, and even the toys of our children. While we may voluntarily interact with some of our devices using this technology, such as conversing with Siri on our iPhones, many of us remain unaware as to the dangerous implications of using voice recognition technology.

Its ability to record some of our most personal conversations allows private companies to eavesdrop on us in an unprecedented manner and amass highly sensitive information about our lives that would have …

The Lawful Access Fallacy: Voluntary Warrantless Disclosures, Customer Privacy, And Government Requests For Subscriber Information, Matthew P. Ponsford

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

This paper explores the recent legal, political, privacy, and communications developments surrounding warrantless government requests for basic subscriber information. I assert the current practice remains marred in secrecy and therefore poses a significant threat to Canadian civil liberties and privacy rights.

Can You Hear Me Now? Conceptions Of Privacy In Section 8, Chris Sewrattan

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

This article will examine the different conceptions of privacy that are present in the jurisprudence of s. 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Section 8 guarantees that everyone has the right against unreasonable search and seizure. As a constitutional right, the protection covers the privacy relationship between the state and the individual. It confers privacy over information for which there exists a reasonable expectation of privacy. The article will analyze a taxonomy of four privacy conceptions present in the literature and discuss their presence in s. 8 case law. It will then examine two criticisms that arise …

Privacy And Insurance In Canada, England, And France - How Does The Responsible Insurer Put Guidelines And Procedures In Place For Retaining And Destroying Personal Information, Christopher Whitehead

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

In this article, I will be discussing records containing personal data or information, and how ‘‘guidelines and procedures” are ‘‘put . . . in place for retaining and destroying [such] information” by private-sector insurers carrying on business in Canada, England, and France. Where I discuss Canada, I use the examples of the law of Ontario — which belongs to the English legal tradition —and of Quebec — whose private law belongs to the French legal tradition. As it happens, these are the two traditions with which I have the most experience relating to personal information.

Hybrid Transactions And The Internet Of Things: Goods, Services, Or Software?, Stacy-Ann Elvy

Articles & Chapters

The Internet of Things (IOT) has been described by the American Bar Association as "one of the fastest emerging," potentially most "transformative and disruptive technological developments" in recent years. Thesecurity risks posed by the IOT are immense and Article 2 of the UCC should play a central role in determinations regarding liability for vulnerable IOT products. However, the lack of explicit clarity in the UCC on how to evaluate Article 2's applicability to hybrid transactions that involve the provision of goods, services, and software has led to conflicting case law on this issue, which contradicts the UCC's stated goals of …

Corporate Directors' And Officers' Cybersecurity Standard Of Care: The Yahoo Data Breach, Lawrence J. Trautman, Peter C. Ormerod

Faculty Publications

On September 22, 2016, Yahoo! Inc. ("Yahoo") announced that a data breach and theft of information from over 500 million user accounts had taken place during 2014, marking the largest data breach ever at the time. The information stolen likely included names, birthdays, telephone numbers, email addresses, hashed passwords, and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers. Yahoo further disclosed its belief that the stolen data "did not include unprotected passwords, payment card data, or bank account information." Just two months before Yahoo disclosed its 2014 data breach, it announced a proposed sale of the company's core …

Compulsory Corporate Cyber-Liability Insurance: Outsourcing Data Privacy Regulation To Prevent And Mitigate Data Breaches, Minhquang N. Trang

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology

No abstract provided.

The “Sovereigns Of Cyberspace” And State Action: The First Amendment’S Application (Or Lack Thereof) To Third-Party Platforms, Jonathan Peters

Scholarly Works

Many scholars have commented that the state action doctrine forecloses use of the First Amendment to constrain the policies and practices of online service providers. But few have comprehensively studied this issue, and the seminal article exploring “[c]yberspace and the [s]tate [a]ction [d]ebate” is fifteen years old, published before the U.S. Supreme Court reformulated the federal approach to state action. It is important to give the state action doctrine regular scholarly attention, not least because it is increasingly clear that “the private sector has a shared responsibility to help safeguard free expression.” It is critical to understand whether the First …