Woodrow Hartzog is an Assistant Professor at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University. His research focuses on privacy, human-computer interaction, online communication, and electronic agreements. He holds a Ph.D. in mass communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an LL.M. in intellectual property from the George Washington University Law School, and a J.D. from Samford University. He previously worked as an attorney in private practice and as a trademark attorney for the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He also served as a clerk for the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Resisting Terms of Use, Or: The Revolution Will Not Be Boilerplate
By Woodrow Hartzog • September 30, 2011 at 2:00 pm
Technology users are becoming frustrated over privacy-invasive terms of use agreements. In the past, this frustration was difficult to channel effectively enough to regularly change the terms. However, that futility is slowly abating. Users are increasingly attempting to negotiate the terms of their agreement through technology or a protracted exchange of public criticism and response. I would like to explain why a few recent developments leave me optimistic that a combination of resistance and innovation can offset some of the inequities in the standard-form contracts formed between users and websites. Read more » about Resisting Terms of Use, Or: The Revolution Will Not Be Boilerplate
CIS on Surprisingly Free
By Woodrow Hartzog • August 17, 2011 at 8:31 am
Ryan Calo and I both recently recorded podcasts for the show Surprisingly Free, which is an excellent weekly podcast for anyone interested in law and technology. Ryan discusses the imminent rise of personal robots and I discuss the ubiquity of website terms of use.
For those who don't know it, Surprisingly Free has hosted many excellent guests, so I recommend exploring the website. If you're interested in law and technology podcasts, I also highly recommend CIS's own Hearsay Culture. Read more » about CIS on Surprisingly Free
The Promise of Privacy Controls
By Woodrow Hartzog • May 1, 2011 at 7:26 pm
Privacy settings and other technological controls used to protect privacy have been justifiably criticized a bit lately. Danielle Citron recently blogged at Concurring Opinions about an important new study conducted by Columbia’s Michelle Madejski, Maritza Johnson and Steve Bellovin that found that Facebook’s default privacy settings fail to capture real-world expectations. The United Kingdom Government has recently indicated that browser settings alone cannot be used by Web users to give consent to being tracked online under a new EU law. The Government's rationale for this decision was that these browser settings were not flexible enough to reflect a user's true privacy preferences. The general consensus seems to be that most privacy settings simply aren't that good at protecting the actual information we consider private in a given context. I think some skepticism regarding privacy controls is warranted, particularly in light of the current technology. However, I'd like to show some support for privacy controls, or, rather, the promise of privacy controls. My hope is that that courts and lawmakers do not completely sour on recognizing privacy controls as a legitimate way to protect an Internet user's privacy.
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Website Design as Contract
By Woodrow Hartzog • April 12, 2011 at 9:06 pm
Few website users actually read or rely upon terms of use or privacy policies. Yet users regularly take advantage of and rely upon website design features like privacy settings. Could these designs be part of the contract between websites and users? A draft of my new article argues just that by developing a theory of website design as contract. This article is coming out in Volume 60 of the American University Law Review later this year. In sum, I argue that in an age where website interactivity is the hallmark for many sites, courts must re-think what constitutes an online agreement. This is particularly true with respect to user privacy. Read more » about Website Design as Contract
The Problems with Requesting Access to Online Communities
By Woodrow Hartzog • March 9, 2011 at 9:08 am
In the past few weeks a few potential employers and schools were reported to have asked for access to the Facebook profile of an applicant or student. These reports are starting to feel like a trend. I think these requests are problematic not just for the Facebook user, but also the employer or administrator asking for access. In short, anyone asking for access to Facebook profiles and/or login credentials is asking users to betray the trust of their network and subjecting all parties involved to the potential deactivation of their Facebook account.
Read more » about The Problems with Requesting Access to Online Communities
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The Fight to Frame Privacy
The Michigan Law Review recently published “The Fight to Frame Privacy,” Woodrow Hartzog's book review of Daniel Solove’s “Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security.”
Read the full review here: http://www.michiganlawreview.org/articles/the-fight-to-frame-privacy Read more » about The Fight to Frame Privacy
The Case for Online Obscurity
The Life, Death, and Revival of Implied Confidentiality
The concept of implied confidentiality has deep legal roots, but it has been largely ignored by the law in online-related disputes. A closer look reveals that implied confidentiality has not been developed enough to be consistently applied in environments that often lack obvious physical or contextual cues of confidence, such as the Internet. This absence is significant because implied confidentiality could be one of the missing pieces that help users, courts, and lawmakers meaningfully address the vexing privacy problems inherent in the use of the social web. Read more » about The Life, Death, and Revival of Implied Confidentiality
Chain-Link Confidentiality
Disclosing personal information online often feels like losing control over one’s data forever; but this loss is not inevitable. This essay proposes a “chain-link confidentiality” approach to protecting online privacy. One of the most difficult challenges to guarding privacy in the digital age is the protection of information once it is exposed to other people. A chain-link confidentiality regime would contractually link the disclosure of personal information to obligations to protect that information as the information moves downstream. Read more » about Chain-Link Confidentiality
The Case for Online Obscurity
On the Internet, obscure information has a minimal risk of being discovered or understood by unintended recipients. Empirical research demonstrates that Internet users rely on obscurity perhaps more than anything else to protect their privacy. Yet, online obscurity has been largely ignored by courts and lawmakers. In this article, we argue that obscurity is a critical component of online privacy, but it has not been embraced by courts and lawmakers because it has never been adequately defined or conceptualized. Read more » about The Case for Online Obscurity
Found: Secret location of Minneapolis police license plate readers
“This study is a good demonstration not only of how much information is collected, but also how much additional information can be extracted through data analysis,” Woodrow Hartzog, a law professor at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University, told Ars. Read more » about Found: Secret location of Minneapolis police license plate readers
Instagram’s Absurd New Terms of Use Agreement Is Already Being Called Its ‘Suicide Note’
"These kinds of terms are pretty common these days, which is unfortunate, because some of them border on the ridiculous," says Woodrow Hartzog, an assistant professor at Samford University law school who writes frequently about law and the internet. Hartzog says that Instagram needs some level of copyright control user images because "many copies of user content are created via ordinary operation of the website." But he adds, "I think it is fair to question the scope of many of these terms as potentially outside of the realm of what is required to operate. Read more » about Instagram’s Absurd New Terms of Use Agreement Is Already Being Called Its ‘Suicide Note’
Parents use technology to monitor teen drivers
Spies Like Us: We’re All Big Brother Now
Even our traditional definition of "privacy" may no longer apply in a world of omnipresent cameras and recorders, according to Woodrow Hartzog, assistant professor at Samford University's Cumberland School of Law, where he writes on privacy and human engagement with electronics. "Privacy has really ceased to be helpful as a term to guide policy in the United States," he says, "because privacy means so many different things to so many different people. Read more » about Spies Like Us: We’re All Big Brother Now
Facebook Stops Asking Users To 'Snitch' On Friends With Fake Names
“Facebook’s insistence that it will ‘not be using this data for enforcement actions’ puts the company and users in a difficult position,” says law professor Woodrow Hartzog. “If Facebook is openly admitting that it is not going to enforce its own policies when it knows these policies have been violated, how should users gauge the importance of these terms? Alternatively, if Facebook does plan to enforce its ‘real names’ policy, is it really going to be willfully ignorant of this pile of data that could help Facebook pinpoint which users are violating its agreement? Read more » about Facebook Stops Asking Users To 'Snitch' On Friends With Fake Names
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Prof. Woodrow Hartzog and Fred Stutzman - Hearsay Culture - Show #170 - KZSU-FM
September 17, 2012
CIS Affiliate Scholar David Levine interviews Prof. Woodrow Hartzog of Cumberland School of Law, Samford University and Fred Stutzman of UNC on privacy in social media. Read more » about Prof. Woodrow Hartzog and Fred Stutzman - Hearsay Culture - Show #170 - KZSU-FM