Reviving the Public/Private Distinction in Feminist Theorizing Symposium on Unfinished Feminist Business

The public/private distinction has been a target of thoroughgoing feminist critique for quite some time now. Indeed, attacking the public/private line has been one of the primary concerns (if not the primary concern) of feminist legal theorizing for over two decades. If Carole Pateman is correct, one would think that this particular problem might be assigned to the category of finished business by this time. In this Essay, I do argue that the critique is, in certain ways, finished business in that it is no longer particularly useful in its most common forms. More importantly, however, I suggest several ways in which various critiques of the public/private line have left much business unfinished

Reviving the Public/Private Distinction in Feminist Theorizing Symposium on Unfinished Feminist Business

The public/private distinction has been a target of thoroughgoing feminist critique for quite some time now. Indeed, attacking the public/private line has been one of the primary concerns (if not the primary concern) of feminist legal theorizing for over two decades. If Carole Pateman is correct, one would think that this particular problem might be assigned to the category of finished business by this time. In this Essay, I do argue that the critique is, in certain ways, finished business in that it is no longer particularly useful in its most common forms. More importantly, however, I suggest several ways in which various critiques of the public/private line have left much business unfinished

Surveillance and alienation in the online economy

The critical literature on commercial monitoring and so-called ‘free labour’ (Terranova 2000) locates exploitation in realms beyond the workplace proper, noting the productivity of networked activity including the creation of user-generated-content and the profitability of commercial sites for social networking and communication. The changing context of productivity in these realms, however, requires further development of a critical concept of exploitation. This article defines exploitation as the extraction of unpaid, coerced, and alienated labour. It considers how such a definition might apply to various forms of unpaid but profit-generating online activity, arguing that commercial monitoring redoubles the conscious, intentional activity of users in ways that render it amenable to a critique of exploitation. Given the role of commercial monitoring in the emerging online economy, the paper emphasizes the importance of supplementing privacy critiques with approaches that identify the ways in which new forms of surveillance represent a form of power that seeks to manage and control consumer behaviour

Reviving the Public/Private Distinction in Feminist Theorizing

In this Essay, Higgins explores the various uses of the public/private distinction in feminist theorizing. She suggests that feminist attacks on the public/private line tend to overstate the threat that the concept poses to women\u27s equality and to understate the potential value of the distinction in feminist theory. Acknowledging that, despite thoroughgoing theoretical critiques, the public/private line persists in practice, Higgins offers a qualified revival of the distinction in feminist theory and suggests ways of refocusing and refining it to respond to existing critiques

Reviving the Public/Private Distinction in Feminist Theorizing

In this Essay, Higgins explores the various uses of the public/private distinction in feminist theorizing. She suggests that feminist attacks on the public/private line tend to overstate the threat that the concept poses to women\u27s equality and to understate the potential value of the distinction in feminist theory. Acknowledging that, despite thoroughgoing theoretical critiques, the public/private line persists in practice, Higgins offers a qualified revival of the distinction in feminist theory and suggests ways of refocusing and refining it to respond to existing critiques

An Overview of Privacy Law in 2022

Chapter 1 of PRIVACY LAW FUNDAMENTALS (6th edition, IAPP 2022) provides an overview of information privacy law circa 2022. The chapter summarizes the common themes in privacy laws and discusses the various types of laws (federal, constitutional, state, international). It contains a list and brief summary of the most significant U.S. federal privacy laws. The heart of the chapter is an historical timeline of major developments in the law of privacy and data security, including key cases, enactments of laws, major regulatory developments, influential publications, and other significant events. The chapter also contains a curated list of important treatises and scholarly works. PRIVACY LAW FUNDAMENTALS is a distilled guide to the essential elements of U.S. data privacy law. In an easily-digestible format, the book covers core concepts, key laws, and leading cases. The book summarizes the essential provisions of all of the major privacy statutes and regulations, including COPPA, ECPA, FCRA, FERPA, FISA, FTC Act, GLBA, HIPAA, TCPA, Privacy Act, VPPA, and more. The book includes summaries of foreign laws such as the EU\u27s GDPR, China\u27s PIPL, Canada\u27s PIPEDA, Brazil\u27s LGPD, and more. In addition, the book summarizes key state privacy laws and provides an overview of FTC and HHS enforcement actions. The authors provide numerous charts and tables summarizing the privacy statutes (i.e. statutes with private rights of action, preemption, and statutory damages, among other things)

Beyond Contract-versus-Charity, Toward Participation and Provision: On the Concept of Social Citizenship

Also CSST Working Paper #76.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51238/1/472.pd

Information Freedoms and the Case for Anonymous Community

What we have witnessed in the last decade in the context of social upheaval, social activism, and resulting social movements is testament to the need for a re-evaluation of what constitutes community in a networked world, and what role the individual subject plays within social networks, systems of social, corporate, and state control, and networks of resistance. New processes of subjectivation are emerging and rather than being grounded in identity, sociality is being reconfigured, and it is in this process that this dissertation focusses on anonymity as a means of working through these new configurations. This integrated article dissertation explores the concept of anonymity and emerging practices of community in three chapters. The first examines anonymity in the context of civil liberties through a critique of privacy. By analyzing legal, social, and cultural understandings of privacy, this chapter problemmatizes the privacy defence against excessive tracking and monitoring of speech and behaviour, and suggests ways of incorporating anonymous practices in order to discover more robust methods of collectively empowering ourselves in the digital environment. The second chapter explores anonymity as a political process that can be illustrated in the cases of Wikileaks, Anonymous, and Occupy, presenting the various ways in which anonymity is mobilized in information activism as a resource for political action. We can see a common thread running through the variety of methods of dissent employed by the above mentioned groups. This commonality centres on the way anonymity figures (sometimes subtly, other times prominently) in identity formation, subjectivity, trust, revolt, authority, connection and communication. This thesis is an exploration of the role of anonymity at the intersection of these functions of community. The third chapter traces contemporary theoretical explorations of radical community through the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben, and identifies characteristics of anonymity in strategies of being-in-common

Valuing Social Data

Social data production is a unique form of value creation that characterizes informational capitalism. Social data production also presents critical challenges for the various legal regimes that are encountering it. This Article provides legal scholars and policymakers with the tools to comprehend this new form of value creation through two descriptive contributions. First, it presents a theoretical account of social data, a mode of production which is cultivated and exploited for two distinct (albeit related) forms of value: prediction value and exchange value. Second, it creates and defends a taxonomy of three “scripts” that companies follow to build up and leverage prediction value and describes the normative and legal ramifications of these scripts.The Article then applies these descriptive contributions to demonstrate how legal regimes are failing to effectively regulate social data value creation. Through the examples of tax law and data privacy law, it demonstrates these struggles in both legal regimes that have historically regulated value creation, like tax law, and legal regimes that have been newly tasked with regulating value creation by informational capitalism, like privacy and data protection law.The Article argues that separately analyzing data’s prediction value and its exchange value may be helpful to understanding the challenges the law faces in governing social data production and the political economy surrounding such production. This improved understanding will equip legal scholars to better confront the harms of law’s failures in the face of informational capitalism, reduce legal arbitrage by powerful actors, and facilitate opportunities to maximize the beneficial potential of social data value

The By-Design Approach Revisited: Lessons from COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps

This paper challenges the by-design regulatory approach by exploring the case study of Contact Tracing Apps. It aims to account for the gap between the hopes that were pinned on digital technologies and the rock of reality into which they have crashed. This gap, we argue, results from overestimating the regulatory power of technology and underestimating the co-influence of various regulatory pillars. To address this gap, it is necessary to adopt an ecosystem perspective on sociotechnical systems, where technological design is but one form of regulation. This perspective allows technological design to acquire a social meaning through interaction with other regulatory forces to generate a social outcome