I'm going to be teaching "Law Technology and Privacy" at the law school this semester. I'm working on pulling together the syllabus and wonder if you have any suggestions. The course description is:
This course will examine the changing roles of law and technology in challenging our expectations of privacy. In particular, we will ask whether technologies developed in the past two decades that have made storage cheaper, search faster, and access to information easier require concomitant changes in the law to protect individual’s ability to keep information about them private. The course is designed to give students both instruction in the current state of privacy law and an opportunity to explore some of the most important issues framing the ongoing debates on privacy.
Some of the issues we will look at are: conflicts between the First Amendment’s speech protections and individuals’ privacy concerns, and between anonymity and accountability; the difference between privacy interests vis-à-vis governments and corporations and what happens when information collected by companies is later used by the government; whether technology requires international standards for data protection, how those might be achieved, and what happens when US companies operate overseas; how courts should value privacy losses in negligence actions; should technologies that protect privacy like encryption and anonymizers be regulated; how we regulate medical, financial, and other specific types of data, why we regulate by data type, and whether a monolithic data law would be preferable; how new technologies like cell phone geo-location and FasTrak affect privacy concerns; and whether the constitutional framework of protecting “reasonable expectations of privacy” is adequate when technology changes at the rate of Moore’s Law.
A common theme throughout the class will ask whether the trend towards increased transparency that new technologies allow is normatively a positive one or whether the privacy loss requires a legal or technological "fix". Students will be required to write a paper that explores this topic as to one appropriate technology -- either discussed in class or of their own choosing -- and posit whether the law and technology should be changed, and how, to create a more suitable balance of the associated interests.