Privacy Law Commons^™

"Three Parent Babies": Techniques Explained, Objections Examined, Rebecca Carr

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

The UK Parliament has approved regulations, which come into force in October 2015, that permit the use of new treatment techniques to prevent the transmission of serious mitochondrial diseases from women to their children. The introduction of these techniques—which are not currently carried out in any country in the world—will fly in the face of the opposition that has been raised since discussions to permit clinical applications of the techniques first arose. After outlining some background to the techniques, this article briefly examines three of the objections that have been made against them: that the safety and effectiveness of the …

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us: Defining The Line Between Personal And Professional Context On Social Media, Raizel Liebler, Keidra Chaney

Pace Law Review

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram allow individuals and companies to connect directly and regularly with an audience of peers or with the public at large. These websites combine the audience-building platforms of mass media with the personal data and relationships of in-person social networks. Due to a combination of evolving user activity and frequent updates to functionality and user features, social media tools blur the line of whether a speaker is perceived as speaking to a specific and presumed private audience, a public expression of one’s own personal views, or a representative viewpoint of an entire …

Social Justice, Social Norms And The Governance Of Social Media, Tal Z. Zarsky

Pace Law Review

This article proceeds as follows: Part II briefly addresses the theoretical arguments regarding the pros and cons of various governance strategies, focusing on the advantages, disadvantages and pitfalls of reliance on private parties. In Part III, the article describes, in general terms, the above-mentioned empirical study, explaining its methodology, the specific challenges to its design and implementation, and how these were met. The discussion specifically centers on a survey taken to establish the nature of social norms. Part IV presents a specific test case: whether pseudonymity should be permitted in social media or should “real names” be mandatory. Part V …

Protecting Privacy To Prevent Discrimination, Jessica L. Roberts

William & Mary Law Review

A person cannot consider information that she does not have. Unlawful discrimination, therefore, frequently requires discriminators to have knowledge about protected status. This Article exploits that simple reality, arguing that protecting privacy can prevent discrimination by restricting access to the very information discriminators use to discriminate. Although information related to many antidiscrimination categories, like race and sex, may be immediately apparent upon meeting a person, privacy law can still do significant work to prevent discrimination on the basis of less visible traits such as genetic information, age, national origin, ethnicity, and religion, as well as in cases of racial or …

Sacrificing Privacy For Convenience: The Need For Stricter Ftc Regulations In An Age Of Smartphone Surveillance, Ashton Mckinnon

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

This comment aims to focus on the most frequently used connector that consumers treasure not only for convenience but also as a lifelong necessity - the smartphone. The FTC needs to enforce federally mandated guidelines that will allow the consumer to use technology without the technology using the consumer. Part II of this comment focuses on the type of information that can be collected by various companies, service providers, and agencies from an individual's smartphone, and the intentions of these collectors behind use of this information. Part III evaluates how applications (apps) contribute to this scheme, and, specifically, apps' recordkeeping …

Clapper V. Amnesty International Usa: Balancing National Security And Individuals' Privacy, Kristen Choi

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

Librarians As Advocates For Social Media Privacy, Sarah Lamdan

LACUNY Institute 2015

Librarians must continue their traditional roles as privacy rights activists and intellectual freedom upholders into the digital age, and across electronic information sources, including social media fora. Social media is quickly becoming a major source of information and center for information seeking, and librarians have an opportunity to promote and help shape social media policies that protect users’ privacy and assure that users can seek information without inhibition. One way librarians can be involved in the promotion of online privacy is by joining the social media user rights movement and advocating terms of use agreements that protect information seekers that …

The Surveillance State: Do License Plate Readers Impinge Upon Americans' Civil Liberties?, Jourdin Hermann

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

The boundaries that delineate public from private sphere have challenged our political system’s foundations since its origination. License plate readers (LPRs), a tool used by law enforcement and private businesses, cause citizens and their government to question the criteria separating public and private information. While police and repossession agencies contend that license plate readers aid their work, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) argues that surveillance equipment interferes with an individual’s right to privacy. Addressing such privacy concerns requires the public to hold its government accountable by petitioning for limits on LPR use and data retention. LPRs also pose unique …

The Snowden Effect: The Conflict In A Free Society, Who Values Privacy Versus Who Values Security?, Matthew C. Blake

Political Science Theses and Capstones

The Obama Administration has come under scrutiny by both the public and Congress, since former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden made known the scope of government surveillance programs being utilized by the U.S. government to gather intelligence on domestic citizens. Snowden’s disclosures about the government’s surveillance practices to the mainstream media began in June 2013. I focus on how public opinion towards the government’s surveillance practices and an individual’s reasonable right to privacy has shifted after revelations made by Edward Snowden on the practices of the NSA. Individuals may show support for more government surveillance in the name …

Setting The Table For Feast Or Famine: How Education Will Play A Deciding Role In The Future Of Precision Agriculture, Lauren Manning

Journal of Food Law & Policy

Precision agriculture has many names including satellite farming, or site-specific crop management. Early forms of precision agriculture involved creating fertilizer maps, yield measurements, grid sampling, and soil pH content monitoring. Roughly 25 years ago, the advent of global positioning systems, commonly known as GPS, enabled farmers to make more informed decisions about where to plant seed and how much seed to plant. Precision agriculture technologies typically utilize sensors that are placed on tractors, combines, and other farm equipment, and which measure various conditions including seeding rates, soil conditions, and other indicators of production. Over time, this technology has been expanded …

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 …