The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School is a leader in the study of the law and policy around the Internet and other emerging technologies.
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"Arvind Narayanan, now an associate professor at Princeton and part of that early DNT-formulating group, said via an email statement that the prospect of federal legislation brought ad players to the table. But when that legislation didn’t materialize, “the prolonged negotiations in fact proved useful to the industry to create the illusion of a voluntary self-regulatory process, seemingly preempting the need for regulation.”"
"“I don’t think it’s an impossible task. It’s a hard task, and it depends on the defaults we want to live with,” said Danielle Citron, a University of Maryland law professor specializing in online free speech and privacy issues.
That could mean delays and filters to inspect content that was possibly violent or showing non-consensual sex, Citron said."
"The troubling state of consumer privacy was the subject of a panel discussion hosted by KUOW and GeekWire in Seattle on Thursday with Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood. She caught up with Giri Sreenivas, CEO of Seattle private email server startup Helm, Ryan Calo, co-director of the University of Washington Tech Policy Lab, and me, GeekWire’s civic editor, to dig into the data economy.
"But privacy expert Jen King fears drivers may sacrifice more than they realize.
“Where you go every day can tell people a lot about what you’re interested in, where you live, who you’re associating with,” says King, director of consumer privacy for the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School."
"Welcome back to What’s Next, where we report on the intersection of law and technology. Today, we talk with Stanford’s Riana Pfefferkorn about deepfakes and why lawyers need to care about this alarming issue. Also, autonomous vehicles could affect our zoning laws (think fewer parking garages). More on that random legal aspect, and more, below.
"“You’ve really got a rock-and-a-hard-place situation happening here,” said Woody Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University. “Facial recognition can be incredibly harmful when it’s inaccurate and incredibly oppressive the more accurate it gets.”"
"“There’s been a lot of confusion in [the] industry, and ambiguity in regulatory interpretation, concerning the adapting of online content distribution and ads to GDPR,” said Omer Tene, VP and chief knowledge officer with the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP). “In this case, the Dutch DPA expressed a restrictive reading. In other cases, other DPAs applied the legislative language more liberally.
"Jen King, Director of Consumer Privacy at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, calls these companies her “worst nightmare.”
“A lot of the data we share online is expirable, in some sense,” she says. “Your shopping habits or your basic demographic data change over time. Your DNA never changes. It literally has an infinite shelf life — and it’s uniquely identifiable in a way that no other personal data is.”"
"It's generally difficult to hold companies criminally liable, according to Bryant Walker Smith, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law who studies autonomous vehicles. The circumstances would have to be egregious and reckless: for example, a company that paid bonuses to test drivers whose vehicles had the most close calls with pedestrians. A company that falsified information on the quality of its cars, misleading the government, would also have a higher chance of being criminally liable."
"“Encrypting all kinds of communication — that’s going to help people not be blackmailed, not have other people intercept their pictures or their sensitive information,” said Ryan Calo, a University of Washington law professor."
"“One of the main reasons we’ve adopted body-worn cameras across the country is because of a mistrust of police and for the purpose of improving community/police relations,” said Harlan Yu, executive director of the Washington civil rights nonprofit Upturn, which evaluates departments’ body camera policies. “This is the animating concern of the adoption of body cameras, building that trust.""
"“This does nothing to address the ad targeting and information collection about individuals,” said Jen King, director of consumer privacy at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. “It’s great for your relationship with other people. It doesn’t do anything for your relationship with Facebook itself.”"
"Metadata is valuable because it can be just as revealing as what you write in a message, says Jonathan Mayer, assistant professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University in New Jersey, and former chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission’s Enforcement Bureau.
"Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor whose research focuses on automated driving systems, suggests not reading too much into the prosecutor's letter.
"It's not necessarily exculpatory — it doesn't exonerate Uber or put the company's conduct then or now beyond criticism," he writes in an email to NPR. "And I'm not sure it tells us much about the criminal, much less civil, liability of automated driving developers in future incidents."
"Jennifer Granick, attorney with ACLU, points out that the arguments, or those engaging in them, are often paradoxical. The same people who don’t want Facebook to restrict job searches to people of certain age or housing by ethnicity may want Facebook to remove what they consider hateful speech. The social media companies also talk from both sides of their mouth, arguing like media companies that they need to cover both sides of, say, political issues, but then pooh-poohing calls for the kind of regulation media companies have.
"“5G is an evolution, not a revolution,” Thomas Lohninger told TNW. Lohninger is the Executive Director of the digital rights NGO epicenter.works, which recently published a report on net neutrality in the EU (PDF).
"At the Senate hearing, Northeastern University’s Professor of Law and Computer Science Woodrow Hartzog said he teaches his students to expect to deal with a patchwork of state laws on a variety of issues, so the argument that state regulation stifles innovation may not be true, because many industries consider it a legal reality.
"“In the United States, we have a tradition of dealing with a patchwork of 50 state laws, [and] while there are virtues to consistency, it’s not the obstacle that would strike me as the first thing we have to surmount if we’re going to get privacy right,” said Woodrow Hartzog, the lone privacy advocate testifying before the committee, and a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University."
"How long have you operated with that assumption?
Probably 20 years. I had an incident occur in my hotel room at Black Hat. My room was broken into, and my tech was compromised. They pulled the hard drive out of the wall safe, plugged it into my Linux laptop, booted it up off of a different drive, and then accessed files and copied it. Then they put the drive back in the safe.
"Hartzog said a 50-state regulatory patchwork isn’t unworkable “because it’s what we’ve been dealing with all along.”"