Chuck Cosson

Position / Title:

Non-Residential Fellow

Focus Areas:

Areas of Expertise:

Chuck Cosson is Director, Legal Affairs, Privacy & Security, at T-Mobile US, based in Bellevue, WA. At T-Mobile, Chuck oversees privacy compliance programs and provides legal guidance on mobile Internet, location services, incident response, and other privacy, security, and business issues. Chuck spent 7 years at Microsoft leading that company’s public policy work on human rights, free expression, and child online safety. He has also worked in Washington, D.C. on telecommunications policy and regulation. His engagement with Stanford focuses on the role of metaphor as a guide for contemporary technology law and policy - a conception of the Internet not as a “place you go” but as a “tool you use.”

Blog Posts

Tool Without a Handle: Tools and the Search for Meaning

By Chuck Cosson on September 3, 2018 at 5:29 pm

“Tool Without a Handle”: Tools and the Search for Meaning

In a New York Times review of Edward Tenner’s book The Efficiency Paradox, Gal Beckerman observes that a key point is not simply to watch how much time we spend using technology, but to remember that “the tools we’ve invented to improve our lives are just that, tools, to be picked up and put down. We wield them.”

Which pretty succinctly states the main point of this entire series of blog posts: that human agency matters. Or, perhaps more directly, that while we all know human agency matters, we all too frequently overlook that point. This post (on Labor Day, 2018) thus asks what is the real value of human agency? By identifying value in it, I hope to set the stage for future posts on the urgency of fostering greater awareness of it.

Tool Without A Handle: Online Confessions

By Chuck Cosson on March 22, 2018 at 8:49 pm

In my last post, I wrote of moral hazards created by privacy, using extramarital affairs as just one example (really, any legal or moral wrongdoing facilitated by secrecy illustrates the point). Privacy, as it happens, also encourages use of networked information technologies for confession of moral wrongs and provides incentives for both wrongdoers and victims to find support from others with similar interests and concerns.

Tool Without a Handle: Privacy and Moral Hazard

By Chuck Cosson on January 15, 2018 at 2:41 pm

Discussions of privacy tend to focus on the value of privacy. This post agrees that privacy has value in practical terms, as an important moral principle, and for its contribution to human flourishing. At the same time, these observations are incomplete. Privacy, like security and transparency, involves trade-offs. Indeed, it involves trade-offs with precisely those other qualities – security and transparency in particular. Privacy, for example, protects data that would reveal fraud, lies, and other wrongdoing.

Tool Without A Handle: Taking Space Seriously

By Chuck Cosson on October 28, 2017 at 2:04 pm

As I’ve been writing about networked information technologies as “tools,” it’s worth reiterating that metaphors of space are not entirely without value, including in areas of the law that derive from laws relating to real property. Having noted in multiple prior posts the weaknesses of spatial metaphors, here I discuss some of their common applications in ways that are productive. There are two particular applications of the physical space metaphor to online platforms and services that are interesting:

1) Content moderation questions - including vetting of advertisers and user-submitted content;

2) Data Rights questions - if content is posted is it free to copy? To commercialize?

"Tool Without a Handle: Metaphors of Gender"

By Chuck Cosson on September 2, 2017 at 5:33 pm

It’s difficult to recall an internal memo gone viral that has sparked as much commentary as James Damore’s statement on gender and engineering at Google. This post is not about that memo, although the volume of commentary on it did prompt the thoughts that follow. Nor is this post about workplace diversity, at least not directly. Instead, like many other “Tool Without a Handle” posts, it is about metaphor.

In particular, I wanted to test whether, in preferring the metaphor of “a tool you use” as distinct from “a place you go,” I’d unduly limited my thinking to an “androcentric” view of networked information technologies. In other words, is “tool” a masculine metaphor, implying a gendered orientation towards my preferred approach to thinking about technology?

I conclude the answer is “no,” in part because metaphor differs from gender, and in part because metaphor is a feature of language, while gender is a feature of persons. Moreover, I identify a general objection to dichotomizing and to gender metaphors.

Digital Switzerlands

Conference on Trade Secrets and Algorithmic Systems

Stanford Internet and Society Lab - Secret Dockets, Secret Searches

2018 NACDL Conference: Combatting the Surveillance State

Chuck Cosson

Chuck Cosson

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