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.
"Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of Surveillance and Cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, points out old-fashioned gum shoe work still has value.
"“Unimpressive,” declared Princeton computer scientist Jonathan Mayer, who said the scheme would be easy for advertisers to evade. “This is not privacy leadership — this is privacy theater.”"
"Jen King, the director of privacy for the Center for Internet and Society, says she believes that most people tend to find privacy settings very confusing. Facebook, which regularly revamps its privacy settings and takes users through an extremely detailed set of options, comes to mind most often. But Google is not immune to this either.
"Ryan Calo, University of Washington law professor
""I don't know how well people actually understand," said Jen King, director of consumer privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. She adds that the company should give people more options to opt out of data collection, instead of lumping things together."
"The complicating factor for the President in this case is that, well, he is the President. Not only that, but he uses his account to conduct government business. Because the government is the only body that can violate the First Amendment, that puts Trump's Twitter habits on tricky legal footing, says Danielle Citron, professor of law at the University of Maryland and author of the book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. "He’s the President. Whenever the government creates zones of public discourse, they have very special obligations under the First Amendment," Citron says."
"But so far, many more officials have followed Strickland out of government than back into it.
"To those within and without the legal profession, the ruling is strange. "It's an interesting and unusual case," says Stephen Smith, retired federal judge and Director of Fourth Amendment & Open Courts at Stanford University''s Center for Internet and Society.
"Neighborhood message boards are already famously rife with racism, and Motherboard reported earlier this year it had found frequent racist comments on Ring's app as well. “I think having the videos oftentimes makes things even worse than they would be in just a text-based neighborhood message board format,” said Harlan Yu, executive director of the research group Upturn."
"“It’s really important to understand how much Europe is in the driver’s seat,” says Daphne Keller, director of Intermediary Liability at the Center for Internet and Society, as well as former associate general counsel at Google. “It kind of doesn’t matter what U.S. law says for a lot of things. Europe is extracting agreements by companies — they're going to enforce those agreements publicly.”"
""So far, we haven't gotten really close to the maximums [of the agency's statutory fining authority], but one of the things we're looking at seriously is emphasizing larger civil penalties," Simons said during an interview with Omer Tene, the International Association of Privacy Professionals' Vice President and Chief Knowledge Officer, during the IAPP's Global Privacy Summit in Washington, D.C."
"But that doesn't mean these videos aren't bullying. Shaheen Shariff is a professor at McGill University and the director of the Define the Line research program, which examines cyberbullying.
"I always talk about beginning the line. In this case they have definitely crossed the line and can be sued under various different legal options."
"Law professor Ryan Calo studies digital market manipulation at the University of Washington, and he looks back to the 1970s when the Federal Trade Commission created new rules to deal with door-to-door sales.
“The idea was a kind of 1950s notion that women were at home, you know, tending to the house in their curlers,” Calo said. “And all of a sudden, some sweet-talking salesperson would come to the door and sell them a bunch of encyclopedias.”
"“It is very hard to participate in civil life and be anonymous,” Albert Gidari, the privacy director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, said on Wednesday. “You can’t buy a car in cash and avoid disclosing who you are because now car dealers are financial institutions,” Mr. Gidari said, adding that it was nearly impossible to transfer money in and out of the United States without disclosing who you are to the government.
"Thomas Lohninger of civil rights group Epicenter Works told German-language website Der Standard: “It’s remarkable how little thought has gone into this.”"
"Facebook's new hires may be jumping at a chance to try to shake up a technology company that has suffered repeated privacy scandals from the inside. And the hiring blitz suggests the company recognizes it needs more manpower dedicated to privacy as it grapples with tougher data laws in the European Union and soon California.
'For instance, if many people are eyeing a not-so-healthy dessert but not buying it, a store could place it at the checkout line so you see it again and "maybe your willpower breaks down," said Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law and co-director of its Tech Policy Lab.
"Just because a company doesn't know exactly who you are doesn't mean they can't do things that will harm you," Calo said."
"“Be mad at tech, that’s understandable,” Alex Feerst, head of legal policy for the online publishing site Medium, said at a recent event on the “unintentional harms” of speech regulations.
But adding restrictions to online speech laws or liabilities for platforms would come with downsides, he warned.
“Companies will simply over-remove out of risk aversion,” he said."
"Last year, AV legislation didn’t pass the US Congress. “Some senators distrusted the technologies and the developers of those technologies and the regulators of those technologies,” writes Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor, via email. Those suspicions were well placed, he argues.