Privacy Law Commons^™

Table Of Contents

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Masthead

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Crafting A New Maryland Two-Party Consent Law With A Nice Ring To It, Ryan Brooks

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Picture this: Late on a dark autumn night, a teenage boy is staying at his godfather’s house.[1] Suddenly, the boy falls victim to unspeakable sexual abuse committed by his godfather.[2] Shortly thereafter, the boy escapes the house without his godfather’s knowledge.[3] To get help, the boy tries to get the attention of a neighbor.[4] He approaches neighboring house number one—no answer.[5] He approaches neighboring house number two—no answer.[6] He approaches neighboring house number three—and the homeowner answers the door by using his “doorbell camera.”[7] The boy states that there is an emergency and …

Smart Contracts Are Neither Smart Nor A Contract: The Case Against Smart Contract Utilization In Everyday Consumer Or Commercial Transactions, Jim Moye

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No doubt, most of us have gone into a local electronics store or ordered a new gadget from an online provider. After purchasing the gadget, we are eager to start operating the new purchase. Before fully utilizing the gadget, however, there are a series of screens requiring the user to read, acknowledge, and consent to, various clauses. If this process is not completed, the user is denied full access to the gadget. Thereafter, entry is granted, and the user is free to utilize the electronic device. This is a prime example of utilizing technology to automate a process that would …

At The Hart Of Immigration Reform: How Dhs’S New Biometric Database Will Infringe On The Privacy Rights Of U.S. Citizens, Permanent Residents, And Foreign Nationals, Calypso Moschochoritis

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Immigration is a regular feature of American life; President Obama once described the U.S. as “a nation of immigrants.” Even as the host of more immigrants than any other nation, the American public has historically found immigration contentious. Since Congress has failed to agree on comprehensive immigration reform, this responsibility has moved to the executive and judicial branches of government. In 2016, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began working on the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) Program, a new biometric information management system, to replace IDENT (Automated Biometric Identification System), DHS’s current biometrics database. HART will join other initiatives …

Kid Clickbait: Online Privacy Concerns For The Children Of Today's Social Media Movement, Kiara Green

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

Brokered Violence: Safety For Sale In The Free Marketplace Of Data, Sam Adler, Thomas E. Kadri, Chinmayi Sharma

Popular Media

This article exposes how the unregulated data broker industry fuels violence by selling detailed personal information gathered from public records, social media, and private sources. Drawing on the Minnesota assassinations and other cases, it shows how such data enables stalking, harassment, and targeted attacks. The piece critiques state and federal laws like California’s DELETE Act and New Jersey’s Daniel’s Law for leaving victims to navigate slow, fragmented removal processes. It proposes a centralized victim registry with rapid compliance requirements, shifting responsibility to brokers. Finally, it challenges the industry’s First Amendment defense, urging legal reforms that prioritize public safety over commercial …

Green Dividends: A Case Study In Green Dividends And The Conditions For Private Ordering Solutions, Anne M. Tucker

Seattle University Law Review

This Essay introduces a novel private ordering solution to facilitate corporate investments in pro-social and environmental initiatives: Green dividends. Green dividends are an optional increase in shareholder dividends that are returned to the company to be reinvested in environmental initiatives or kept by a shareholder.

Green dividends pose an alternative to the current gridlocked debate that corporations can’t, won’t, shouldn’t, and shouldn’t even try to act in pro-social or environmental ways. Turning the common refrains on their head converts each narrative into an element for a successful private ordering solution: authority, accountability, shareholder buy-in, and government- backed enforcement. With Green …

Does Climate Disclosure Work To Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Emerging Evidence Suggests Cautious Optimism, Cynthia A. Williams

Seattle University Law Review

Significant regulatory resources have been spent developing global, voluntary climate and sustainability disclosure standards, such as the TCFD, TNRD, and ISSB’s Sustainability and Climate Disclosure standards, or domestically required disclosures, such as in the EU and in the U.S. Thus, it is important to evaluate whether this disclosure, particularly voluntary, qualitative disclosure, will have the power to shift the allocation of capital, will have a significant effect on the management of climate risk within firms, and ultimately will reduce climate change risk and biodiversity loss.

In this Article, several interrelated questions will be discussed. First, what does the empirical evidence …

Genetic Privacy, Ifeoma Ajunwa, Forrest Briscoe

Indiana Law Journal

The last decade has brought many technological advances to genetic testing. Increasingly, genetic testing, which was previously reserved for clinical or medical settings, has made its way to other spaces. Most significantly, we are now seeing the re-introduction of genetic testing to the workplace. Although the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), which became law in 2009, would seemingly prohibit genetic testing in the workplace, genetic testing, as part of workplace wellness programs, is lawful under the aegis of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This poses a threat to genetic privacy in the workplace. While some, like the actor Angelina Jolie, …

Smartphones On Wheels In Southeast Asia: A Crossroads For Data Governance, Attamongkol Tantratian, Gunn Jiravuttipong

Journal of Law and Mobility

While the transformation of automobiles into data-generating “smartphones on wheels” has revolutionized mobility, it has also raised critical concerns over data privacy and sovereignty. Equipped with sensors and connected technologies, smart vehicles collect vast amounts of data, including personal information, driving patterns, and biometric identifiers. While auto-exporting jurisdictions such as the United States, the European Union, and China have introduced regulatory measures to address these challenges, countries importing smart vehicles remain vulnerable due to their limited influence over the auto companies’ integrated technology and data policies.

This Article examines the regulatory and economic challenges faced by developing nations integrating foreign-designed …

Faking It: A Proposed Solution To Counter Nonconsensual Pornographic Deepfakes, Rena Song

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

2024 Louise A. Halper Award Winner for Best Student Note.

Deepfakes have become popular due to their user-friendly nature and accessibility, allowing anyone to create one by installing deepfake software programs on their phones or laptops. Deepfake software programs allow creators to create hyper-realistic multimedia featuring anyone whose image they can find. Some industries have drawn positive uses from deepfakes; however, deepfakes also create harms that can have detrimental effects on people’s mental health, employment, and reputation. Women and children, including those without a large online presence, have become the target for nonconsensual pornographic deepfakes. Congress has yet to pass …

A New State Constitutional Right To Informational Privacy: The Origins Speak, Albert E. Scherr, Neal Kurk

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] This article occupies the space between the ongoing, newly energized development of state constitutional law and the fraught public policy field of privacy protections. It analyzes a new state constitutional provision that is explicitly and exclusively about information privacy. The provision, Part I, Article 2b9 of the New Hampshire Constitution,10 reads as follows: An individual’s right to live free from governmental intrusion in private or personal information is natural, essential, and inherent.11 The provision extends an individual’s privacy right significantly beyond that of both the federal and New Hampshire state constitutions. It operates at the intersection of privacy and …

The Second Life Of Information, Thomas D. Haley

UF Law Faculty Publications

Information permeates every aspect of modern life. It is the price we pay for access to online services and the form in which we embody creative works. Law and policymaking tend to focus on first-order uses and transactions; information for access serves as the paradigmatic example. But information enjoys a robust second life—one that constitutes the true value and power that drives firms’ decisionmaking—as assets. Once aggregated and assetized, the power and risk associated with information increases exponentially.

To explore the implications of information’s second life, this Article introduces the concept of “untethered information.” Assetization depends on severing the connections …

Do Ais Dream Of Electric Boards?, Robert J. Rhee

UF Law Faculty Publications

When artificial intelligence (“AI”) acquires self-awareness, agency, and unique intelligence, it will attain ontological personhood. Management of firms by AI would be technologically and economically feasible. The law could confer AI with the status of legal personhood, as it did with the personhood of traditional business firms in the past, thus dispensing with the need for inserting AI as property within the legal boundary of a firm. As a separate and distinct entity, AI could function independently as a manager in the way that legal or natural persons do today: i.e., AI as director, officer, partner, member, or manager. Such …

The Expressive Power Of Protecting Intimate Privacy: A Comparative Study Of Legal And Platform Measures, Danielle Keats Citron, Jonathon W. Penney, Alexis Shore Ingber

Articles & Book Chapters

Intimate privacy violations exact profound costs to freedom, including chilling victims into silence; denying them sexual agency; and eroding trust critical to intimate expression and sharing. Effective intimate privacy protections could mitigate these harms via law’s expressive function—sending a message or “signal” that victims of intimate privacy invasions are valued, and their expressions worthy of protection. However, without proof, skepticism is warranted about potential expressive functions as there has been an absence of proof to back up these claims. This Article aims to help fill this void, making a theoretical and empirical case for a positive expressive impact of both …

Federalism, State Action, And Workers' Medical Privacy, Ani B. Satz

Indiana Law Journal

Injured workers entering state workers’ compensation systems effectively forego their medical privacy. This is due to widespread judicial misinterpretation of the HIPAA Privacy Rule (HPR) as excluding injured workers from federal medical privacy protections. As a result, medical privacy for workers’ compensation claims is effectively governed by state law. This Article argues that states have failed to protect the medical privacy of injured workers adequately and that there is a pressing need for legislative reform. The Article presents the first comprehensive survey in the legal literature of state action protecting the medical privacy of injured workers. Part I describes the …

The Warrant Exception That Isn't: Fisa Section 702, "Defensive" Searches, And The Fourth Amendment, Noah C. Chauvin

Faculty Articles

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the government to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance of non-Americans who are located overseas. Although the surveillance targets foreigners, Americans' communications are "incidentally" collected, too. Once the government has acquired Americans' communications, court-approved rules allow it to conduct warrantless searches for and through them in its Section 702 databases. Intelligence agencies have used these rules to turn this foreign intelligence program into a domestic spying tool, conducting tens of thousands of warrantless "backdoor" searches for Americans' private communications obtained under Section 702 every year.

Section 702 periodically sunsets; Congress most recently reauthorized …

Oh Mother, Where Art Thou Paycheck?: Answering The Mommy Blogger Dilemma With Increased Privacy And Financial Protections For Minors, Sarah M. Parker

SPARK Symposium Presentations

This paper provides an overview of the current child entertainment laws and highlights the need for increased protection of minors working on social media, ultimately arguing for the adoption of a nationwide Coogan Law modeled after Illinois' law and the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. The paper provides a sample Uniform Coogan Code that jurisdictions could adopt to implement such protections for minors online, including provisions covering required savings, financial access by parents, and the right to be forgotten.

Katz'S Imperfect Circle: An Empirical Study Of Reasonable Expectations Of Privacy, Tonja Jacobi, Christopher Brett Jaeger

Faculty Articles

Under Katz v. United States, the Fourth Amendment restricts government actions that infringe upon expectations of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable. This foundational test has long been criticized as circular, both because courts can shape the very expectations they seek to identify through their decisions and because governments can manipulate those expectations to expand the reach of their own power. But how do members of society decide what expectations are reasonable, and how do judges ascertain those expectations? And are expectations of privacy malleable even without deliberate manipulation?

This Article shows that the circularity critique is both understated …