The Los Angeles Times quotes me over the weekend in its front page story about the use of a Predator B drone to catch a civilian suspect in North Dakota. In my comments, I allude to how the domestic use of drones may paradoxically help drag privacy law into the twenty-first century. Stanford Law Review Online just published my short article on this topic. You can find the full text here. Thoughts welcome. Read more » about To Catch With A Predator
I'm guest blogging over at Concurring Opinions this month. My first post explored what the domestic use of drones would mean for privacy law. I also did a two-part post on "DRM for Privacy." Here is the first post. And the second. Excerpt below. Thoughts welcome.
Online privacy has been getting quite a bit of attention of late. But the problem seems as intractable as ever. In a pair of posts, I will explore one aspect of the online privacy debate and, drawing from a controversial corner of copyright law, suggest a modest fix. This first post discusses the problem of consumer tracking and the lack of any good solutions. You may want to skip this post if you are familiar with the online privacy ecosystem (and uninterested in correcting my oversimplifications and mistakes). The next post discusses how an often criticized provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—the anti-circumvention clause—might hold lessons for consumer privacy. This provision prohibits tampering with so-called digital rights management. The law has its problems as a mechanism to enforce copyright. As applied to consumers’ efforts to protect their privacy, however, a few of Section 1201’s bugs metamorphose into features. Read more » about Guest Blogging At Concurring Opinions
I have been blogging about Nevada's efforts to pave the way toward driverless vehicles in that state. Nevada recently become the first state to pass a law tasking the Department of Motorvehicles with developing a set of standards to license autonomous driving on the state's highways. In other words, Nevada is hoping for an early mover advantage in cornering this emerging technology. Reports are now surfacing that Oklahoma has taken steps to reserve an air corridor for the domestic use of autonomous drones. If approved by the Federal Aviation Administration, this would free up an 80 mile stretch for the military, hobbyists, and others to operate drones in U.S. airspace. One estimate places the number of domestic drones at 15,000 by 2018. Read more » about Oklahoma To Nevada: You Can Have The Roads, We'll Take The Sky
According to the Nevada Legislature's website, AB 511 "revis[ing] certain provisions governing transportation" passed the Assembly (36-6) and the Senate (20-1) and was signed into law by the governor this week. Although I am aware of no law that prohibits driverless cars, this appears to be the first law officially to sanction the technology. Specifically, the law provides that the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles "shall adopt regulations authorizing the operation of autonomous vehicles on highways within the State of Nevada." The law charges the Nevada DMV with setting safety and performance standards and requires it to designate areas where driverless cars may be tested. (Note that this could take some serious time: Japan, for instance, has been promising standards for personal robots for years and has yet to release them.) Read more » about Nevada Governor Signs Driverless Car Bill Into Law
I agree with most everything economist Tyler Cowen said in his insightful New York Times op ed about autonomous vehicles. This technology holds tremendous promise in enhancing passenger safety, efficiency, and mobility. (See also Sebastian Thrun’s March 31 TED talk). I also agree that law and policy may act, as Cowen suggests, to impede innovation and adoption of driverless cars. But Cowen’s assertion that the driverless car “is illegal in all 50 states,” which he reasserts and defends in a recent blog post, represents a serious overstatement. And, in a way, an ironic one: the public assertion that driverless cars are illegal could be almost as chilling to potential innovators and consumers as passing laws against this technology. Read more » about On The Legality Of Driverless Vehicles: A Response To Tyler Cowen
Is it lawful for a car to drive itself? In the absence of any law to the contrary, it should well be. A new bill is working its way through the Nevada state legislature that would remove any doubt in that state. A.B. 511 directs the Nevada Department of Transportation to authorize autonomous vehicle testing in certain geographic areas of Nevada. Should vehicles meet Nevada DOT standards, they would be permitted to "operate on a highway." The bill defines not only autonomous vehicle, but artificial intelligence as well. AI is "the use of computers and related equipment to enable a machine to duplicate or mimic the behavior of human beings." An autonomous vehicle uses "artificial intelligence, sensors, and [GPS] coordinates to drive itself." To be clear: autonomous vehicles are not yet the law of the land in Nevada. This bill must pass through two committees and receive a hearing before it can be voted on and become law. Some preliminary thoughts on the bill in its present form follow. Read more » about Nevada Bill Would Pave The Road To Autonomous Cars
Requiring notice is an extraordinarily popular way to regulate. In online privacy, for instance, giving notice about their practices is among the only affirmative obligations websites face. The strategy is also one of the most heavily criticized. Not only does no one read privacy policies, skeptics rightly point out, but many believe that their mere existence guarantees certain base level protections that may or may not exist.
Should we give up on notice? My recent draft paper argues: maybe not. We should explore two possibilities, at any rate, before we do. The first is that regulators may sometimes select the wrong form of notice for the job. Today most website “terms” say that the company “may disclose data pursuant to lawful requests.” That does very little to further user understanding or action. But maybe it could work to: Read more » about Against Notice Skepticsm In Privacy (And Elsewhere)
Facebook previewed a new notice strategy today. Part of the proposed change is a simpler privacy policy. Meh. I, like many, am a privacy policy skeptic. I'm skeptical of layered notice, too. I'm even skeptical of privacy policy icons, tables, and nutrition-style labels. They all run into the same problem: written text cannot simultaneously be readable and exhaustive, thorough and yet concise.
As an alternative, I argue for a concept I've been calling "visceral" privacy notice. Rather than tell people at length what your privacy practices may be, you show them what they really are. Facebook took a step in this direction today, joining Google and Yahoo! in what I hope to be an emerging best practice.
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The intuition that privacy and innovation are somehow opposed is surprisingly common. It is true that overzealous or reactionary appeals to privacy can cut off interesting ventures. (For instance, some believe Steamtunnels would have evolved into a social network in 1999 were it not shut down by the Stanford University due to privacy and copyright concerns.) But privacy generally supports innovation, and vice versa. Read more » about Privacy & Innovation: A Data Privacy Day Reflection
Over Christmas, I received a series 530 Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner from iRobot. It cleans the floor really well. But that is all it does. This year at the Consumer Electronics Show, iRobot revealed the prototype AVA. It is, essentially, an open robotic platform. Think of it as an iPad with a body. It has no dedicated purpose and, importantly, it has an API and will run software made by third-party developers.
Yes, apps for robots. This is a wonderful development, one that I predicted in a forthcoming essay in Maryland Law Review. As iRobot founder Colin Angle points out, "If you think of the thousands of apps out there: Which iPad apps would be more cool if they moved?" More importantly, would you not be more inclined to buy a personal robot that came with thousands of programs, with more on the way. Read more » about Apps For Robots: iRobot's AVA At CES
