Category: Privacy
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By Gordon Hull Privacy plaintiffs have a hard time getting their cases heard in court for a variety of reasons. One of them is that courts lack a coherent and workable understanding of what privacy harms actually are, and how one might articulate them judicially. This problem bleeds into one of standing, which is what…
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Here's the current draft of a new paper – "Translating Privacy for Data Subjects." And here's the abstract: This essay offers a theoretical account of one reason that current privacy regulation fails. I argue that existing privacy laws inherit a focus on judicial subjects, using language about torts and abstract rights. Current threats to privacy,…
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This article from Gizmodo reports on research done over at Mozilla. Newer cars – the ones that connect to the internet and have lots of cameras – are privacy disasters. Here’s a paragraph to give you a sense of the epic scope of the disaster: “The worst offender was Nissan, Mozilla said. The carmaker’s privacy…
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Luke Stark argues that Facial recognition should be treated as the “plutonium of AI” – something so dangerous that it’s use should be carefully controlled and limited. If you follow the news, you’ll know that we’re currently treating it as the carbon dioxide of AI, a byproduct of profit-making that doesn’t look too awful on…
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If you want to use their website; WaPo has the story here. But it's one of those public/private partnerships where data leaks and hacks and thefts happen. To their credit, the Post went to Joy Buolamwini, whose work proved that facial recognition systems work best on white men and worst on Black women. But even…
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By Gordon Hull In one of the Seinfeld episodes, the proprietor of a popular lunch stop would deny service to customers who offended his arbitrary sensibilities with a loud “No Soup for You!” This is basically the outcome of the Supreme Court’s June decision on standing, TransUnion v. Ramirez. “Standing” in this sense refers to…
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By Gordon Hull I’ve written about the importance of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) before (see also here). Briefly, BIPA is the most important and powerful of the (relatively few) state laws designed to protect biometric privacy. The statute establishes a notice-and-consent regime (sigh. better than nothing, though N&C doesn’t work well, and is…
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By Gordon Hull As one knows, online privacy policies (and access to the Internet in general) are generally conditioned on a user’s acceptance of some sort of boilerplate terms of service. Lots of people (myself included) have complained about this state of affairs as attempting to get users to consent to all sorts of practices…
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By Gordon Hull Last time, I suggested that a recent paper by Mala Chatterjee and Jeanne Fromer is very helpful in disentangling what is at stake in Facebook’s critique of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). Recall that BIPA requires consent before collecting biometric identifiers, and a group of folks sued FB over phototagging. Among…
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By Gordon Hull Facial recognition technology is an upcoming privacy mess. An early example of why is photo-tagging on Facebook. The privacy problem was noted a while ago by Woody Hartzog and Frederic Stutzman: “once a photo is tagged with an identifier, such as a name or link to a profile, it becomes searchable …making…
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