Ryan Calo

Ryan Calo is an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law and a former research director at CIS. A nationally recognized expert in law and emerging technology, Ryan's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wired Magazine, and other news outlets. Ryan serves on several advisory committees, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Future of Privacy Forum. He co-chairs the American Bar Association Committee on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence and serves on the program committee of National Robotics Week.

You can read Ryan's work on SSRN and follow him on Twitter.

Privacy Policy Workshop: PowerPoint & Audio

By Ryan Calo • January 29, 2009 at 3:05 pm

As part of Data Privacy Day 2009, the Center for Internet and Society hosted a Privacy Policy Workshop, sponsored by Covington & Burling LLP. I've attached our PowerPoint slide deck. You can follow along to an audio recording of the event by clicking here.

We had a great turn out and a lot of interesting questions. Thanks to Covington & Burling LLP, especially Mali Friedman for her presentation, and to Intel, especially Jolynn Dellinger, for coordinating Data Privacy Day. Read more » about Privacy Policy Workshop: PowerPoint & Audio

Database Of Privacy Enhancing Technologies

By Ryan Calo • January 21, 2009 at 12:26 pm

Please visit the Center for Internet and Society's new wiki (cyberlaw.stanford.edu/wiki) and contribute to our privacy enhancing technology (PET) database.

Stanford Law School student Seth Gilmore got us started on a PET wiki. As the name suggests, PETs are technologies or techniques that assist users in protecting their information from abuse. They include software allowing for anonymous surfing, plug-ins that reveal who is tracking you online, and improvements in browser security. Microsoft and the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada cosponsor an award for PETs, and there is a call for papers (due March 2, 2009) for an upcoming PET conference in Seattle. Read more » about Database Of Privacy Enhancing Technologies

Ghostery.com: Not Just A Cool Icon

By Ryan Calo • January 11, 2009 at 3:16 pm

David Cancel just created a wonderful privacy enhancing technology for Firefox---up there with Ad Blocker Plus in my view. In a simple and straightforward way, Ghostery reveals who is tracking your views of a page on the Internet according to a common but under-examined method: web bugs.

As David explains, "[w]eb bugs are used to track your behavior on the web in order to help the sites you visit to understand their own audiences and to allow advertisers to target ads at you." To expand a little, web bugs are tiny (generally one-pixel) pictures on a web page that tell a host or third-party when and by whom they are being loaded, which in turn reveals that the page itself has been loaded. David's elegant plug-in "scans the web pages you visit to find web bugs" and displays their owners in the upper right hand corner of the page. Ghostery is easy to install, use, and shut off. Read more » about Ghostery.com: Not Just A Cool Icon

Devices As Themselves Social

By Ryan Calo • January 2, 2009 at 1:02 pm

Social networks have gotten a lot of play in recent years. What about social devices? I've been thinking about whether/how the nature of computer interfaces is changing—specifically, becoming less passive and more “social.”

My conversations with academics in Stanford's Department of Communications, and the research they've guided me toward, leads me to believe that we are once again at the edge of a shift in the way we communicate. For a variety or reasons, PCs and other computers in cars, mobile devices, etc., are making increased use of voice-driven, natural language interfaces or avatars, moving computing away from the traditional mode of passive information processing toward a more social, "person to person" interaction.

Some quick examples. Google's VP of Search gave a recent interview at Le Web during which she said that Google was exploring a more conversational interface that would allow users to actually ask Google questions out loud as though conversing with a person. Although it has met with (comic) resistance in the past, a trail of Microsoft patents going back ten years shows how serious the company is about developing a social interface, complete with voice, expressions, and gestures. As much as twenty-five percent of Microsoft's research efforts reportedly involve artificial intelligence. Even the U.S. government has gotten into this game: the U.S. Army’s virtual recruiter, SGT Star, responds to questions out loud, changes moods, makes jokes, etc. According to developer statistics, SGT Star has responded to over two million questions since his debut in 2006. Read more » about Devices As Themselves Social

E-Books: Who's E-Reading Over Your Shoulder?

By Ryan Calo • December 23, 2008 at 5:55 pm

Electronic books are a little like flying cars; always right about to catch on. Today the New York Times asks “Could book lovers finally be willing to switch from pages to pixels?” In an interesting piece in Technology, Brad Stone and Motoko Rich interview publishers in an attempt to size this market, concluding that the era of e-books may (finally) have arrived.

Lots could be said on this topic--much praised and much lamented. But we've been discussing a particular angle here at CIS: whether this page to pixel migration might have serious repercussions for reader privacy. Read more » about E-Books: Who's E-Reading Over Your Shoulder?

Ryan Calo

Driverless Car Summit

Vehicle Automation: TRB @ Stanford

52nd Annual Workshop on Transportation Law

Big Data and Privacy: Making Ends Meet

Ryan Calo

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