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.

Unvarnished Revisited (& Updated)

By Ryan Calo • April 3, 2010 at 7:04 pm

UPDATE: Unvarnished changed its privacy policy, addressing some of the problems I mentioned. Thanks!

I recently wrote about my disappointment in Unvarnished’s privacy policy. To his credit, founder Pete Kazanjy immediately invited me to coffee. Turns out they’ve been thinking very hard about the delicate balance between anonymity and accountability, it just hasn’t made its way into the privacy policy. (The privacy policy, like the service itself, is still in beta.) Read more » about Unvarnished Revisited (& Updated)

Unvarnished & Unintellible

By Ryan Calo • April 2, 2010 at 11:31 am

UPDATE: I had a good meeting with Peter Kazanjy about Unvarnished. My thoughts on that meeting and what I learned here. Among other things, Unvarnished has now cleaned up its privacy policy to address many of the concerns I mention below.

Like many of you, I'm trying to figure out what the personal reputation website Unvarnished (now in beta) is all about. I notice that I need to sign in through Facebook Connect before I can kick the proverbial tires. So, before turning over my entire Facebook profile to a unknown entity, I decide to check out Unvarnished's privacy policy. I find I don't understand it. Read more » about Unvarnished & Unintellible

WhatApp.org: Now In Beta

By Ryan Calo • March 18, 2010 at 4:58 pm

There's an app for everything these days. But users often don't have a complete picture of the applications they download and use. Privacy policies are technical or vague and seldom allow users to compare practices among different services. Too often users are compelled to forgo their privacy if they want to use a given online product or service. There is little ability to choose an application based on better privacy or security practices because there are few ways to learn that information at the time of download.

Indeed, ninety-one percent of respondents to a TRUSTe survey expressed a willingness to take further steps to safeguard their privacy if presented with usable tools.
WhatApp.org is an app review website that tries to do just that. WhatApp.org combines traditional consumer reporting and review tools with wikis, ratings, and news feeds to allow both savvy Internet experts and novices to share insights about privacy and security features. With nearly 200 applications from a diverse array of platforms (iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, Android, and Firefox), WhatApp.org aims to help fill the current market gap between consumer demand for privacy friendly applications and insufficient practices employed by many, though certainly not all, developers. Here's how to get involved: Read more » about WhatApp.org: Now In Beta

Google Italy & Privacy: Not What You Might Think

By Ryan Calo • March 17, 2010 at 11:00 am

Reading through Italian news coverage of the Google Italy case, another picture emerges. User privacy may well be at issue, but not in the way you probably think. I grew up in Italy and now research and teach Internet law in the United States. When I heard about the verdict against three Google executives, one of them an alumnus of the law school where I work, I went first to American sources, then to Italian ones. What I found was that most Americans may be getting the basic facts and ideas of the case wrong. Read more » about Google Italy & Privacy: Not What You Might Think

Chatroulette: From Art To Commodity

By Ryan Calo • February 22, 2010 at 10:49 am

Chatroulette is frame to much of what is terrible and much of what is wonderful about the Internet. It is the best of websites and it is the worst of websites. In case you’re one of the few people that reads cyberspace blogs but doesn’t know about the service, Chatroulette sets up a video, audio, or text chat session with a completely random stranger. Either party to the arrangement can skip to the next. That’s about it. Chatroulette does not require registration let alone age verification, although the site makes noises about having to be at least 16. You can change the display a little. There, I’ve described it.

Chatroulette takes many of the most interesting facets of the Internet and runs them into their no-frills, logical boundary. The Internet permits anonymous speech; Chatroulette can be completely anonymous. The Internet permits people to connect across diverse communities; Chatroulette practically forces this connection. It is deeply democratic in the sense that it makes no effort to privilege one type of content over another. The brainchild of a Russian child, reportedly hosted in Germany and written in English, Chatroulette is dramatically international. It connects the curious youth of Europe, to you and I, to the white-hatted frat boys of America, to all the weird anywhere shut-ins in between. Read more » about Chatroulette: From Art To Commodity

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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