Privacy Law Commons^™

The "Worst Law In Technology": How The Computer Fraud And Abuse Act Allows Big Businesses To Collect And Sell Your Personal Information, Alicia Nakhjavan

Brooklyn Law Review

For years, big businesses have been collecting and selling users’ personal information without permission. In attempts at preventing this practice, users have brought civil actions under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), alleging a loss of personal privacy. As currently enacted, “personal privacy” is not included in the statutory definition of loss. Further, courts have been reluctant to interpret the CFAA broadly to cover loss of personal privacy claims. This note proposes that an amendment to the CFAA is necessary to close this gap in the statute’s coverage and better protect users’ right to privacy.

Confidentiality, Warning And Aids: A Proposal To Protect Patients, Third Parties And Physicians

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Risk And Rights In Transatlantic Data Transfers: Eu Privacy Law, U.S. Surveillance, And The Search For Common Ground, Ira Rubinstein, Peter Margulies

Connecticut Law Review

Privacy advocates rightly view the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decision in Data Protection Commissioner v. Facebook Ireland Ltd. and Maximilian Schrems (Schrems II) as a landmark. But, one stakeholder’s landmark is another’s headache. The CJEU’s decision invalidated the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield agreement governing transatlantic transfers of personal data. Citing U.S. surveillance, the CJEU found that data transfers lacked adequate privacy protections under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The Schrems II decision thus clouded the future of data transfers that help drive the global economy. This Article offers a hybrid approach to safeguard privacy rights …

The Law Of Employee Data: Privacy, Property, Governance, Matthew T. Bodie

Indiana Law Journal

The availability of data related to the employment relationship has ballooned into an unruly mass of performance metrics, personal characteristics, biometric recordings, and creative output. The law governing this collection of information has been awkwardly split between privacy regulations and intellectual property rights, with employees generally losing on both ends. This Article rejects a binary approach that either carves out private spaces ineffectually or renders data into isolated pieces of ownership. Instead, the law should implement a hybrid system that provides workers with continuing input and control without blocking efforts at joint production. In addition, employers should have fiduciary responsibilities …

Understanding Chilling Effects, Jonathon W. Penney

Articles & Book Chapters

With digital surveillance and censorship on the rise, the amount of data available unprecedented, and corporate and governmental actors increasingly employing emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology for surveillance and data analytics, concerns about “chilling effects,” that is, the capacity for these activities to “chill” or deter people from exercising their rights and freedoms, have taken on greater urgency and importance. Yet, there remains a clear dearth in systematic theoretical and empirical work points. This has left significant gaps in understanding. This Article has attempted to fill that void, synthesizing theoretical and empirical insights from law, privacy, …

Mental Health Mobile Apps And The Need To Update Federal Regulations To Protect Users, Kewa Jiang

Michigan Technology Law Review

With greater societal emphasis on the need for better mental health services coupled with COVID-19 limits, mental health mobile applications have significantly risen in variety, availability, and accessibility. As more consumers use mental health mobile applications, more data is generated and collected by mobile application companies. However, consumers may have the false assumption that the data collected is protected under HIPAA or have an expectation of privacy protection higher than current regulations afford. This Note examines HIPAA, Health Breach Notification Rule, and section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, as well as how these regulations fall short of protecting …

Right Of Self, Mitchell F. Crusto

Washington and Lee Law Review

The exercise of free will against tyranny is the single principle that defines the American spirit, our history, and our culture. From the American Revolution through the Civil War, the two World Wars, the Civil Rights Movement, and up to today, Americans have embraced the fundamental rights of the individual against wrongful governmental intrusion. This is reflected in our foundational principles, including the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution, the Reconstruction Amendments, the Nineteenth Amendment, and, more recently, in the Supreme Court’s recognition of fundamental individual rights within the Constitution’s penumbras. However, there is no …

The New State Of Surveillance: Societies Of Subjugation, Khaled Ali Beydoun

Washington and Lee Law Review

Foundational surveillance studies theory has largely been shaped in line with the experiences of white subjects in western capitalist societies. Formative scholars, most notably Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, theorized that the advancement of surveillance technology tempers the State’s reliance on mass discipline and corporal punishment. Legal scholarship examining modern surveillance perpetuates this view, and popular interventions, such as the blockbuster docudrama The Social Dilemma and Shoshana Zuboff’s bestseller The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, mainstream the myth of colorblind surveillance. However, the experiences of nonwhite subjects of surveillance—pushed to or beyond the margins of these formative discourses—reflect otherwise. …

Another Katz Moment?: Privacy, Property, And A Dna Database, Claire Mena

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Fourth Amendment protects the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The understanding of these words seems to shift as new technologies emerge. As law enforcement’s arsenal of surveillance techniques has grown to include GPS tracking, cell phones, and cell site location information (CSLI), the Supreme Court has applied Fourth Amendment protections to these modern tools. Law enforcement continues to use one pervasive surveillance technique without limitations: the routine collection of DNA. In 2013, the Supreme Court in Maryland v. King held that law enforcement may routinely …

Private Rights Of Action In Privacy Law, Lauren Henry Scholz

William & Mary Law Review

Many privacy advocates assume that the key to providing individuals with more privacy protection is strengthening the government’s power to directly sanction actors that hurt the privacy interests of citizens. This Article contests the conventional wisdom, arguing that private rights of action are essential for privacy regulation. First, I show how private rights of action make privacy law regimes more effective in general. Private rights of action are the most direct regulatory access point to the private sphere. They leverage private expertise and knowledge, create accountability through discovery, and have expressive value in creating privacy-protective norms. Then to illustrate the …

Whither Privacy Protection In The Law Of Nuisance, Cheng Lim Saw, Aaron Yoong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Privacy-related concerns often feature in disputes involving the tort of private nuisance. Despite the growing importance ascribed to the protection of an individual’s privacy in the modern world, English law has tended to shy away from allowing such concerns to influence the thinking behind the more traditional areas of law (like nuisance). This article examines and questions the various notions that underpin this English approach. Using the recent decisions of Giles Duncan Fearn v The Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery [2019] EWHC 246 (Ch) and Giles Fearn v The Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery [2020] EWCA …

Platforms, Encryption, And The Cfaa: The Case Of Whatsapp V Nso Group, Jonathon W. Penney, Bruce Schneier

Articles & Book Chapters

End-to-end encryption technology has gone mainstream. But this wider use has led hackers, cybercriminals, foreign governments, and other threat actors to employ creative and novel attacks to compromise or workaround these protections, raising important questions as to how the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the primary federal anti-hacking statute, is best applied to these new encryption implementations. Now, after the Supreme Court recently narrowed the CFAA’s scope in Van Buren and suggested it favors a code-based approach to liability under the statute, understanding how best to theorize sophisticated code-based access barriers like end-to-end encryption, and their circumvention, is now …

Regulating Social Media In The Global South, Zahra Takhshid

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the disinformation crisis has made regulating social media platforms a necessity. The consequences of disinformation campaigns are not only limited to election interferences or political debates; they have also included fatal consequences. In response, however, scholars in the United States have generally focused on regulating social media companies in the United States, without paying much attention to these companies’ global impact, particularly in the Global South. Lost in the quest to fight disinformation is addressing the social media companies’ neglect of consumer rights in the Global South.

Countries in the Global North, such as the United States, …

Normative Models For The Protection Of Children And Teenagers’ Personal Data, Hugo Teles, Marcelo Varella

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

No abstract provided.

Me, Myself And My Digital Double: Extending Sara Greene’S Stealing (Identity) From The Poor To The Challenges Of Identity Verification, Michele E. Gilman

All Faculty Scholarship

Identity is an essential part of the human condition. When one’s identity is stolen or when a state rejects a citizen’s identity, the consequences can be devastating to one’s notion of selfhood as well as undermine their economic security. In Stealing (Identity) from the Poor, Sara Greene explores the serious harms suffered by low-income people who are victimized by identity theft. She explains that our plutocratic regime of identity theft laws serves the interests of wealthier Americans at the expense of those experiencing poverty.

This Essay extends Greene’s analysis and framing to the harms of identity verification systems, particularly in …

Canadian Privacy Law And The Post-War Freedom Of Information Paradigm, Jonathon W. Penney

Articles & Book Chapters

An overemphasis on technology among Canadian privacy scholars has neglected other important historical factors in the development of privacy law. The chapter aims to help fill that void through a case study examining how a broader Post War paradigm, centred on freedom of information, impacted on Canada's most important early privacy laws, including Canada's first privacy law - Part VI of the Canadian Human Rights Act (1977); the federal Privacy Act (1983); and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA)(2000). The case study suggests that despite wider concerns about privacy when each law was enacted, those concerns were …

Narrowing Data Protection's Enforcement Gap, Filippo Lancieri

Maine Law Review

The rise of data protection laws is one of the most profound legal changes of this century. Yet, despite their nominal force and widespread adoption, available data indicates that these laws recurrently suffer from an enforcement gap—that is, a wide disparity between the stated protections on the books and the reality of how companies respond to them on the ground. Indeed, Appendix I to this Article introduces a novel literature review of twenty-six studies that analyzed the impact on the ground of the GDPR and the CCPA: none found a meaningful improvement in citizen’s data privacy. This raises the question: …

Sociotechnical Safeguards For Genomic Data Privacy, Ellen W. Clayton, Zhiyu Wan, Et Al.

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Recent developments in a variety of sectors, including health care, research and the direct-to-consumer industry, have led to a dramatic increase in the amount of genomic data that are collected, used and shared. This state of affairs raises new and challenging concerns for personal privacy, both legally and technically. This Review appraises existing and emerging threats to genomic data privacy and discusses how well current legal frameworks and technical safeguards mitigate these concerns. It concludes with a discussion of remaining and emerging challenges and illustrates possible solutions that can balance protecting privacy and realizing the benefits that result from the …

Unfair Collection: Reclaiming Control Of Publicly Available Personal Information From Data Scrapers, Andrew M. Parks

Michigan Law Review

Rising enthusiasm for consumer data protection in the United States has resulted in several states advancing legislation to protect the privacy of their residents’ personal information. But even the newly enacted California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA)—the most comprehensive data privacy law in the country— leaves a wide-open gap for internet data scrapers to extract, share, and monetize consumers’ personal information while circumventing regulation. Allowing scrapers to evade privacy regulations comes with potentially disastrous consequences for individuals and society at large.

This Note argues that even publicly available personal information should be protected from bulk collection and misappropriation by data scrapers. …

Recent Developments, Silas Heffley

Arkansas Law Review

In a case involving a Missouri televangelist, a purported COVID-19 cure, and state officials from Arkansas and California, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s dismissal for lack of personal jurisdiction.