The ACLU of Northern California has published a primer (PDF) on the advantages to businesses of good privacy and free speech practices. The primer assembles many real-world instances of harms and benefits to companies due to their choices around user privacy and value speech. Congratulations to Nicky, Chris, and no doubt others in putting this together.
“Robots again.” That’s how federal appellate judge Alex Kozinski begins his dissent from the Ninth Circuit’s decision not to rehear Wendt v. Host International. The “robots” refers to animatronic replicas of Cliff and Norm from the TV series Cheers built by an airport bar chain as a gimmick. The “again” refers to the earlier case of White v. Samsung, where Samsung ran ads depicting a robot version of Wheel of Fortune’s Vanna White with the tag line “Longest-running game show, 2012 A.D.” She sued. (To her credit, however, Ms. White kept her head. She did not turn into a car and drive over to Samsung headquarters, as was no doubt her first instinct.)
People suing over robot versions of themselves is just one of the ways robots make ordinary cases more interesting. As personal robotics moves toward the multibillion-dollar market Bill Gates and some analysts predict, we are likely to see more—and more interesting—robot-driven litigation. What follows is a little tour of robot case law to date.
As if we privacy advocates didn't have enough to worry about, this sea otter apparently got a hold of a video camera and was "filming" tourists. Witnesses speculated that some boater dropped the camera and this fun-loving, puppy-of-the-sea found it floating in the Bay. But of course you and I know the terrible truth: DARPA microchips...
Facebook trends proceed at a spooky (in the quantum sense) pace. It took the New York Times all of a week to pick up on 25 Random Things. I’ve noticed a subtler trend lately, one that is perhaps a more obvious sign of the times. The nostalgic photo album.
The Stanford Technology Law Review’s symposium is scheduled for February 27th, 2009. According to its website, the symposium will “showcase vibrant legal scholarship on the interplay between new advances in neurotechnology and traditional legal principles and concerns.”
Outside of a J.R.R. Tolkien novel, power does not reside in any one person, object, or place. But it does cluster. An enormous percentage of those “in power,” that is, in a position to make decisions of societal scope, are trained as lawyers. Nearly every judge has been to law school, as have the majority of legislators, many industry and non-profit leaders, and 26 out of the past 44 U.S. presidents.
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.
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.
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.
