Privacy Law Commons^™

Preserving Privacy In A Digital Age: Lessons Of Comparative Constitutionalism, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the modern age, we increasingly live our lives through, and accompanied by, digital media. Virtually every transaction or communication that uses such media, as well as every move of mobile phone owners, is recorded. Computers are able to store, transmit, and analyze the data as never before, drawing on multiple sources to construct an intimate picture of our interests, contacts, travels and desires. Private data-mining services, most often used for commercial advertising purposes, can determine: what we read, listen to, and look at; where we travel to, shop, and dine; and with whom we speak or associate. Meanwhile, social …

Biometric Id Cybersurveillance, Margaret Hu

Faculty Scholarship

The implementation of a universal digitalized biometric ID system risks normalizing and integrating mass cybersurveillance into the daily lives of ordinary citizens. ID documents such as driver’s licenses in some states and all U.S. passports are now implanted with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. In recent proposals, Congress has considered implementing a digitalized biometric identification card—such as a biometric-based, “high-tech” Social Security Card—which may eventually lead to the development of a universal multimodal biometric database (e.g., the collection of the digital photos, fingerprints, iris scans, and/or DNA of all citizens and noncitizens). Such “hightech” IDs, once merged with GPS-RFID tracking …

Genetic Privacy & The Fourth Amendment: Unregulated Surreptitious Dna Harvesting, Albert E. Scherr

Georgia Law Review

Genetic privacy and police practices have come to the
fore in the criminal justice system. Case law and stories
in the media document that police are surreptitiously
harvesting the out-of-body DNA of putative suspects.
Some sources even indicate that surreptitious data
banking may also be in its infancy. Surreptitious
harvesting of out-of-body DNA by the police is currently
unregulated by the Fourth Amendment. The few courts
that have addressed the issue find that the police are free
to harvest DNA abandoned by a putative suspect in a
public place. Little in the nascent surreptitious harvesting
case law suggests that surreptitious …

Real Masks And Real Name Policies: Applying Anti-Mask Case Law To Anonymous Online Speech, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

The First Amendment protects anonymous speech, but the scope of that protection has been the subject of much debate. This Article adds to the discussion of anonymous speech by examining anti-mask statutes and cases as an analogue for the regulation of anonymous speech online. Anti-mask case law answers a number of questions left open by the Supreme Court. It shows that courts have used the First Amendment to protect anonymity beyond core political speech, when mask-wearing is expressive conduct or shows a nexus with free expression. This Article explores what the anti-mask cases teach us about anonymity online, including proposed …

Drone Federalism: Civilian Drones And The Things They Carry, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

Civilian drones are scheduled to be permitted in the national airspace as early as 2015. Many think Congress should establish the necessary nationwide regulations to govern both law enforcement and civilian drone use. That thinking, however, is wrong. This Essay suggests drone federalism instead: a state-based approach to privacy regulation that governs drone use by civilians, drawing on states’ experience regulating other forms of civilian-on-civilian surveillance. This approach will allow necessary experimentation in how to best balance privacy concerns against First Amendment rights in the imminent era of drone-use democratization. This Essay closes by providing some guidance to states as …

Can The States Keep Secrets From The Federal Government?, Robert A. Mikos

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

States amass troves of information detailing the regulated activities of their citizens, including activities that violate federal law. Not surprisingly, the federal government is keenly interested in this information. It has ordered reluctant state officials to turn over their confidential files concerning medical marijuana, juvenile criminal history, immigration status, tax payments, and employment discrimination, among many other matters, to help enforce federal laws against private citizens. Many states have objected to these demands, citing opposition to federal policies and concerns about the costs of breaching confidences, but the lower courts have uniformly upheld the federal government’s power to commandeer information …

Information Escrows, Ian Ayres, Cait Unkovic

Michigan Law Review

A variety of information escrows - including allegation escrows, suspicion escrows, and shared-interest escrows - hold the promise of reducing the first-mover disadvantage that can deter people with socially valuable private information from disclosing that information to others. Information escrows allow people to transmit sensitive information to a trusted intermediary, an escrow agent, who only forwards the information under prespecified conditions. For example, an allegation escrow for sexual harassment might allow a victim to place a private complaint into escrow with instructions that the complaint be lodged with the proper authorities only if the escrow agent receives at least one …

Four Easy Pieces To Balance Privacy And Accountability In Public Higher Education: A Response To Wrongdoing Ranging From Petty Corruption To The Sandusky And Penn State Tragedy, Robert E. Steinbuch

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Limits Of The Federal Wiretap Act's Ability To Protect Against Wi-Fi Sniffing, Mani Potnuru

Michigan Law Review

Adoption of Wi-Fi wireless technology continues to see explosive growth. However many users still operate their home Wi-Fi networks in unsecured mode or use publicly available unsecured Wi-Fi networks, thus exposing their communications to the dangers of "packet sniffing," a technique used for eavesdropping on a network. Some have argued that communications over unsecured Wi-Fi networks are "readily accessible to the general public" and that such communications are therefore excluded from the broad protections of the Federal Wiretap Act against intentional interception of electronic communications. This Note examines the Federal Wiretap Act and argues that the current Act's treatment of …

Rehnquist And Panvasive Searches, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In the history of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist may have been the least friendly justice toward the view that the Fourth Amendment should be read expansively. Even he, however, might have interpreted the amendment to place more restrictions on modern law enforcement techniques than current caselaw does. Relying on a 1974 article authored by Rehnquist, this essay, written for a symposium on Rehnquist and the Fourth Amendment, describes his views on the types of requirements the Fourth Amendment imposes on the police, how decriminalization can protect privacy, and most importantly, why Rehnquist might have been willing to regulate surveillance …

Looking Through The Prism Of Privacy And Trespass: Smartphones And The Fourth Amendment, Saby Ghoshray

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

Technology in the twenty-first century has dramatically changed our lives, but the law has not kept pace with technological advances. The treatment of smartphones in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is no exception. This is made evident by the increasingly scattered outcomes of litigation involving the privacy interests of smartphone owners.' As the cross-jurisdictional inconsistencies of judicial decisions applying the Fourth Amendment to smartphones mount, I am drawn to seek answers from two foundational pillars of the Supreme Court's search and seizure jurisprudence: protection against invasions of privacy and the bulwark against trespass.

Warrantless Searches And Smartphones: Privacy In The Palm Of Your Hand?, Margaret M. Lawton

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

Incident to a drug arrest, a police officer removes a smartphone from the pocket of the defendant. The smartphone may have incriminating evidence-phone numbers, pictures, text messages, and e-mails. But can the officer examine the smartphone on the scene or back at the station? Or does the officer need to show probable cause and obtain a warrant before examining the phone? If the phone were instead the arrestee's wallet or a cigarette package, under the search incident to lawful arrest exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement the officer could open and search inside either of these "containers." Anything found …

Access For All: A Review Of “Law Libraries, Government Transparency, And The Internet,” A Presentation By Daniel Schuman Of The Sunlight Foundation At The All-Sis Meeting, July 22, 2012, Susan David Demaine

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Attendees at the ALL-SIS Breakfast and Business Meeting at the AALL Annual Meeting had the pleasure of hearing from Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation speak on “Law Libraries, Government Transparency, and the Internet.” The Sunlight Foundation is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization whose mission is to increase access to federal government information resources through advocacy and the development of information technology tools.

The Class Differential In Privacy Law, Michele E. Gilman

All Faculty Scholarship

This article analyzes how privacy law fails the poor. Due to advanced technologies, all Americans are facing corporate and governmental surveillance. However, privacy law is focused on middle-class concerns about limiting the disclosure of personal data so that it is not misused. By contrast, along the welfare-to-work continuum, poor people face privacy intrusions at the time that the state or their employers gather data. This data collection tends to be stigmatizing and humiliating, and it thus not only compounds the harmful effects of living in poverty, but also dampens democratic participation by the poor. The poor interact with the government …

Walled Gardens Of Privacy Or “Binding Corporate Rules?”: A Critical Look At International Protection Of Online Privacy, Joanna Kulesza

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

A growing concern in the era of cloud computing is protecting Internet users' privacy. This concern is compounded by the fact that there are no effective international solutions. This article considers the latest European Union (EU) proposed development in this area – a regulatory model based on amended Binding Corporate Rules (BCR) – as introduced by the EU Justice Commissioner. These planned changes would have worldwide effects on international companies' online activities in transboundary cyberspace.

After providing a background on the concept of defining privacy in general, the article describes the BCR proposal, and proceeds to consider the likelihood of …

Privacy For Social Networking, Connie Davis Powell

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

This article begins by considering the emergence of social networks as a major medium of communication and posits that the success of social networks is attributable to their users' willingness to share their information. Next, the article considers the expectation of privacy for users of social networks and whether such expectation is reasonable. In particular, the article discusses the privacy policies and legal terms governing the use of social networks, and tracks the evolution of such terms and policies as they slowly whittle away user control over time. The article then discusses public outcry regarding the disclosure of information contrary …

Saving Privacy From History, Samantha Barbas

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Electronic Privacy And Employee Speech, Pauline T. Kim

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The boundary between work and private life is blurring as a result of changes in the organization of work and advances in technology. Current privacy law is ill-equipped to address these changes and as a result, employees' privacy in their electronic communications is only weakly protected from employer scrutiny. At the same time, the law increasingly protects certain socially valued forms of employee speech. In particular, collective speech, speech that enforces workplace regulations and speech that deters or reports employer wrong-doing are explicitly protected by law from employer reprisals. These two developments—weak protection of employee privacy and increased protection for …

Understanding The Internet As A Human Right, Michael Karanicolas

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Around the world, fundamental human rights have undergone a dramatic conceptual shift as a result of the spread of the Internet. The right to freedom of expression, once largely limited to printing, has exploded in a digital world that provides users with an unprecedented megaphone to broadcast their views. The right to political participation and the right to free assembly have similarly been reborn in an age of instant communication, allowing activists to mobilise hundreds of thousands of followers with a single email, text or tweet. Although these are the most notable examples, the Internet has also had a transformative …

Harvesting The "Forbidden Fruit" Of Biotechnology Research: Genetic Engineering, International Law And The Patentability Of Higher Life Forms In Canada, Eugene C. Lim

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

As the frontiers of science are constantly redefined by the emergence of new technology, patent law often has to struggle to keep pace with the changing conception of what constitutes a protectable “invention”. A key challenge facing patent law in the age of biotechnology lies in ascertaining the extent to which genetically engineered life forms should be protected. A major concern relates to whether such life forms should be excluded from patentability on grounds of ordre public, ethics and morality.

This article critically explores the extent to which patent law in Canada protects this “forbidden fruit” of biotechnological innovation, and …