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.
CIS in the news.
"“If you walked up to the average person on the street in the U.S. and ask them about GDPR, they’d probably say, ‘Is that a hockey team?’ ” said Albert Gidari, director of privacy at the Center for Internet & Society at Stanford Law School, on Thursday. Gidari said many people don’t seem too concerned about privacy issues.
“I think people believe the benefits (of technology) outweigh the risk to their privacy,” he said."
"Daniel Nazer, a staff attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's intellectual property team, thinks Tinder's case faces many of the same pitfalls. "I think most utility patents in this space face the same problems," he says. (Utility patents protect new machines, processes, and other inventions).
"The Apple-FBI fight over encryption was a rare event. Most of the time, the public never has a clue when authorities come knocking and ask a company for “technical assistance” to help get access to digital communications. That makes the true scale of U.S. government surveillance hard to assess—even if we can glean that it’s pervasive nowadays. And probably equally as important, it doesn’t really allow the public to tell just how difficult it is for prosecutors to convince a judge that communications should be turned over.
"“While al Qaeda and ISIS and their compatriots have staged high profile attacks and plots targeting aviation in the U.S, their high profile attacks targeting rail tended to be either a long time ago (like Madrid and London), in concert with other targets (like Brussels) or in places people in the US pay less attention to (like Mumbai). This is unfortunate, because plots targeting rail infrastructure in the U.S.
"According to Annemarie Bridy, Professor of Law at the University of Idaho and Affiliate Scholar at Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, the Internet is facing some hard questions.
"Riana Pfefferkorn, cryptography fellow at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, said the enforcement action could "light a fire" under other public companies to disclose their own cybersecurity incidents, though the case may not help determine where to set the bar for reporting.
"Like fingerprints in an earlier age, finding a DNA match is now considered the gold standard for criminal prosecutions in America. But the Golden State Killer case puts new attention on how samples are used and obtained in addition to what they tell us. “This isn’t really a DNA story,” Elizabeth Joh, a UC Davis law professor who studies the Fourth Amendment and technology, told me. “It’s a story about data.”
"The lack of transparency about the workings of sensors, logic processors, mapping systems and other driverless technology, like the debate over robot-car regulation, could shape public perception of the nascent industry, said Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina.
"Essentially, [the public will be] looking to see whether these companies are trustworthy," he said"
"Deceptive design nudges, tricks and goads you into sharing more than you might intend to online, Professor Hartzog argues in his new book, Privacy's Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies.
And when you think you're in control of your own data, you rarely are.
"If you want to know when social media companies are trying to manipulate you into disclosing information or engaging more, the answer is always," he said."
"Another attorney, Riana Pfefferkorn, a cryptography fellow at Stanford Law School, underscored the fact that not only was going to a dead person’s fingerprints unsettling, but that it was questionable from a practical perspective.
"This gives cops a perverse incentive to delete any evidence and films or text messages," she told Ars. "What's to stop them from doing that if they learn that this is a viable technique and if the person is dead?""
"Riana Pfefferkorn, a cryptography fellow at Stanford Law School, who earlier this year wrote a whitepaper on "responsible encryption," said that the system could threaten civil liberties and human rights.
"But what happens if the technology makes a mistake? "It's a recipe for tragedy," said Harlan Yu, executive director for Upturn, a technology and social justice non-profit. He's worried that the same technology could misidentify innocent civilians as suspects and perpetuate police brutality.
"Body-worn cameras are supposed to be tools for transparency and accountability," he said. "But facial recognition could eventually turn these body cameras into tools for mass surveillance.""
""Culturally, we’ve taken a huge hit," Danielle Citron, who teaches law at the University of Maryland, told WIRED last March. “Getting people to take this seriously can feel like banging your head against the wall. We’ve been here before with domestic violence and sexual harassment in the workplace. It's so depressing.”"
"A director with Mozilla Corp., the company that makes the Firefox browser, says he welcomes more regulation of the internet but is also urging citizens to push for more privacy protection from the websites they visit.
Marshall Erwin, Mozilla’s director of trust and security, told MPs Thursday that public pressure could encourage companies like Facebook to improve their approach to privacy protection.
"Harlan Yu, executive director of Upturn, which monitors police agencies' body camera policies and is one of the letter's signatories, said the groups felt it important to "draw a bright ethical line" around real-time facial recognition body cameras. He also said the groups were troubled by the lack of representation on the ethics board of communities, particularly those made up of racial minorities, that are subject to intense police scrutiny.
"Just because real-time face recognition might be technologically feasible to do doesn’t mean they should," Yu said."
""These platforms that have really brilliantly democratized the ability to publish for everybody also have brought this sort of architecture that can be gamed for nonsense at a much bigger scale than ever has been seen," said Nabiha Syed, associate general counsel for BuzzFeed."
""Portugal features the worst net neutrality violations we have seen in Europe to this day. It is hard to imagine how an independent regulator cannot find those offers in violation of EU law," said Thomas Lohninger, executive director of epicenter.works, a member organisation of European Digital Rights (EDRi). "In this complaint, we present legal and economic evidence that, by all criteria of the EU net neutrality rules, these products should be prohibited.""
"The European Union is expected to implement sweeping new data privacy laws in May.
"Not to mention its track record. “It’s not just being able to show what happened but being able to show that the data should be believed,” says Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies driverless car regulations. “And then having the resources on all sides—that’s government investigators, plaintiffs, even defendant companies—to be able to analyze that data, understand it, and model it.”"
"“If you trust Amazon with your data, as many people do, then delivery to the trunk of your car is a safe way to getting your package, and perhaps safer than in-home delivery,” said Albert Gidari, director of privacy at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. “This is another example of trading off privacy and security for convenience.”"