Privacy Law Commons^™

Warrant Canaries Beyond The First Amendment: A Comment, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Warrant canaries have emerged as an intriguing tool for Internet companies to provide some measure of transparency for users while also complying with national security laws. Though there is at least a reasonable argument for the legality of warrant canaries in the U.S. based primarily on First Amendment "compelled speech" doctrine, the same cannot be said for the use of warrant canaries in other "Five Eyes” intelligence agency countries — United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia — where the legality of warrant canaries has yet to be examined in either cases or scholarship. This comment, which provides an overview …

Regulating The Internet Of Things: First Steps Toward Managing Discrimination, Privacy, Security, And Consent, Scott R. Peppet

Publications

The consumer "Internet of Things" is suddenly reality, not science fiction. Electronic sensors are now ubiquitous in our smartphones, cars, homes, electric systems, health-care devices, fitness monitors, and workplaces. These connected, sensor-based devices create new types and unprecedented quantities of detailed, high-quality information about our everyday actions, habits, personalities, and preferences. Much of this undoubtedly increases social welfare. For example, insurers can price automobile coverage more accurately by using sensors to measure exactly how you drive (e.g., Progressive 's Snapshot system), which should theoretically lower the overall cost of insurance. But the Internet of Things raises new and difficult questions …

The Ftc And Privacy And Security Duties For The Cloud, Daniel J. Solove, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Third-party data service providers, especially providers of cloud computing services, present unique and difficult privacy and data security challenges. While many companies that directly collect data from consumers are bound by the promises they make to individuals in their privacy policies, cloud service providers are usually not a part of this arrangement. It is not entirely clear what, if any, obligations cloud service providers have to protect the data of individuals with whom they have no contractual relationship. This problem is especially acute because many institutions sharing personal data with cloud service providers fail to include significant privacy and security …

The Ftc And The New Common Law Of Privacy, Daniel J. Solove, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

One of the great ironies about information privacy law is that the primary regulation of privacy in the United States has barely been studied in a scholarly way. Since the late 1990s, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been enforcing companies’ privacy policies through its authority to police unfair and deceptive trade practices. Despite over fifteen years of FTC enforcement, there is no meaningful body of judicial decisions to show for it. The cases have nearly all resulted in settlement agreements. Nevertheless, companies look to these agreements to guide their privacy practices. Thus, in practice, FTC privacy jurisprudence has become …

Reviving Implied Confidentiality, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

The law of online relationships has a significant flaw-it regularly fails to account for the possibility of an implied confidence. The established doctrine of implied confidentiality is, without explanation, almost entirely absent from online jurisprudence in environments where it has traditionally been applied offline, such as with sensitive data sets and intimate social interactions.

Courts' abandonment of implied confidentiality in online environments should have been foreseen. The concept has not been developed enough to be consistently applied in environments such as the Internet that lack obvious physical or contextual cues of confidence. This absence is significant because implied confidentiality could …

The Value Of Modest Privacy Protections In A Hyper Social World, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Two of the greatest modem challenges to protecting personal information are determining how to protect information that is already known by many and how to create an adequate remedy for privacy harms that are opaque, remote, or cumulative. Both of these challenges are front and center for those who seek to protect socially shared information. Social media and wearable communication technologies like Google Glass present vexing questions about whether information that is known by many can ever be "private," what the privacy harm might be from this information's misuse, and how to remedy such harms in balance with competing values …

Rethinking Online Privacy In Canada: Commentary On Voltage Pictures V. John And Jane Doe, Ngozi Okidegbe

Faculty Scholarship

This article problematizes the use of the bona fide case standard as the legal standard for a court to order a third party Internet Service Provider ("ISP") to disclose subscriber information to a copyright owner in online piracy cases. It argues that ISP account holders have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their subscriber information. It contends that the current bona fide case standard affords a relatively low threshold of protection for Internet users’ subscriber information. The reason for which the article takes this position is that the bona fide case standard can be met solely by IP address evidence, …

Intellectual Property’S Lessons For Information Privacy, Mark Bartholomew

Journal Articles

There is an inherent tension between an individual’s desire to safeguard her personal information and the expressive rights of businesses seeking to communicate that information to others. This tension has multiplied as consumers generate and businesses collect more and more personal data online, forcing efforts to strike an appropriate balance between privacy and commercial speech. No consensus on this balance has been reached. Some privacy scholars bemoan what they see as a slanted playing field in favor of those wishing to profit from the private details of other people’s lives. Others contend that the right in free expression must always …

Privacy Harm Exceptionalism, Ryan Calo

Articles

“Exceptionalism” refers to the belief that a person, place, or thing is qualitatively different from others in the same basic category. Thus, some have spoken of America’s exceptionalism as a nation. Early debates about the Internet focused on the prospect that existing laws and institutions would prove inadequate to govern the new medium of cyberspace. Scholars have made similar claims about other areas of law.

The focus of this short essay is the supposed exceptionalism of privacy. Rather than catalogue all the ways that privacy might differ from other concepts or areas of study, I intend to focus on the …

Legislating Trust, John D. Gregory

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

As governments in Canada and elsewhere have considered statutes to ensure that electronic communications are legally effective, they have invariably had to face questions about the reliability of those communications. Can we trust electronic messages, documents, and signatures? Are they the same in law as if they were on paper? What conditions should be imposed in order to give us the right assurances that we can trust them? To answer these questions properly, we need to understand the nature of “trust” and the extent to which legislation can be a source of it, and what other sources should be enlisted …

Book Review: Juries In The 21st Century, By Jacqueline Horan, Vanessa Macdonnell

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

In Juries in the 21st Century, Jacqueline Horan immerses the reader in a discussion of how jury trials operate, how they could be more effective, and how they should adapt to emerging technologies. The book makes three contributions to the existing legal literature. First, it challenges basic assumptions about how juries operate. Horan demonstrates that not all features of modern jury trials are essential or even useful. She argues convincingly that the existing features of the jury system should only be retained if they contribute positively to the process by which the jury arrives at a verdict. This leads Horan …

Near-Field Communication Technology: Regulatory And Legal Recommendations For Embracing The Nfc Revolution, Allan Richarz

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Despite its ease and convenience, NFC technology raises a number of privacy issues. Chief among these concerns are the collection, retention, and usage of personally-identifying information contained within NFC-enabled devices by both private and public entities. Within that category, the most pressing privacy issues inherent in the collection and usage of such information relate to real-time tracking or after-the-fact habit profiling and identity theft. As well, privacy issues persist around the means used, if any, to secure and protect that information from unauthorized third parties both at the end-user and systemic database levels.

In light of these concerns, it is …

Gimme Shelter: International Political Asylum In The Information Age, Jacob Stafford

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

On June 5, 2013, an article in the Guardian revealed highly classified information about surveillance operations being performed by the United States National Security Administration (NSA). The source of this information was a former NSA contractor named Edward Snowden. After arriving in Moscow on June 23, Snowden spent the next forty days in the transit area of Sheremetyevo International Airport in a bizarre state of geopolitical purgatory. Eventually, Russia granted Snowden temporary asylum for one year, followed by a three-year residency permit. This Note uses Snowden's circumstance to consider the current state of international political asylum within the context of …

Atteinte À La Vie Privée Et Publicité Comportementale, Virginie Blanchette-Séguin

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Le présent texte aura pour objet les questions relatives à la vie privée que soulève la publicité comportementale et le suivi des activités des individus qu’elle implique par définition. Pour ce faire, nous délimiterons d’abord le spectre du droit à la vie privée en droit québécois dans ce contexte (I.) et nous poursuivrons selon une approche plus critique en nous prononçant sur les différents arguments pouvant être soulevés quant à l’absence d’une perception humaine dans une violation potentielle du droit à la vie privée (II.)

Fan Fiction And Canadian Copyright Law: Defending Fan Narratives In The Wake Of Canada's Copyright Reforms, Rebecca Katz

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Amateur, non-commercial writing based on contemporary copyrighted works — “fan fiction” — is a practice that is worth defending despite its unclear status vis a vis copyright law. In this article, I assess how Canadian fan authors may defend their works using Canadian copyright law. I argue that the recent copyright reforms are promising for fan and other second generation creators. The new fair dealing categories of parody and satire are positive steps, though the broad and technologically neutral non-commercial user-generated content provi-sion may be the most promising reform of all. I begin with an exploration of the benefits of …

Reforming The Grand Jury To Protect Privacy In Third Party Records, Andrew Taslitz, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

In late 2014, two grand juries returned controversial no bill decisions in police killings, one in Ferguson, Missouri, and one in New York City. These outcomes have renewed calls for grand jury reform, and whatever one thinks of these particular processes and outcomes, such reform is long overdue. One logical source of reform to better respect privacy in records, which would have incidental benefits beyond this privacy focus, would be the newly enacted American Bar Association Standards for Criminal Justice on Law Enforcement Access to Third Party Records (LEATPR).

But LEATPR exempts from its requirements access to records via a …

Our Records Panopticon And The American Bar Association Standards For Criminal Justice, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

"Secrets are lies. Sharing is caring. Privacy is theft." So concludes the main character in Dave Egger’s novel The Circle, in which a single company that unites Google, Facebook, and Twitter – and on steroids – has the ambition not only to know, but also to share, all of the world's information. It is telling that a current dystopian novel features not the government in the first instance, but instead a private third party that, through no act of overt coercion, knows so much about us. This is indeed the greatest risk to privacy in our day, both the unprecedented …

Big Business, Big Government And Big Legal Questions, Michael Mattioli, Todd Vare

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Systematic Government Access To Private-Sector Data Redux, Fred H. Cate, Christopher Kuner, Christopher Millard, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

When Two Worlds Collide: The Interface Between Competition Law And Data Protection, Fred H. Cate, Christopher Kuner, Christopher Millard, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson, Orla Lynskey

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.