Platforms, the First Amendment and Online Speech: Regulating the Filters

In recent years, online platforms have given rise to multiple discussions about what their role is, what their role should be, and whether they should be regulated. The complex nature of these private entities makes it very challenging to place them in a single descriptive category with existing rules. In today’s information environment, social media platforms have become a platform press by providing hosting as well as navigation and delivery of public expression, much of which is done through machine learning algorithms. This article argues that there is a subset of algorithms that social media platforms use to filter public expression, which can be regulated without constitutional objections. A distinction is drawn between algorithms that curate speech for hosting purposes and those that curate for navigation purposes, and it is argued that content navigation algorithms, because of their function, deserve separate constitutional treatment. By analyzing the platforms’ functions independently from one another, this paper constructs a doctrinal and normative framework that can be used to navigate some of the complexity. The First Amendment makes it problematic to interfere with how platforms decide what to host because algorithms that implement content moderation policies perform functions analogous to an editorial role when deciding whether content should be censored or allowed on the platform. Content navigation algorithms, on the other hand, do not face the same doctrinal challenges; they operate outside of the public discourse as mere information conduits and are thus not subject to core First Amendment doctrine. Their function is to facilitate the flow of information to an audience, which in turn participates in public discourse; if they have any constitutional status, it is derived from the value they provide to their audience as a delivery mechanism of information. This article asserts that we should regulate content navigation algorithms to an extent. They undermine the notion of autonomous choice in the selection and consumption of content, and their role in today’s information environment is not aligned with a functioning marketplace of ideas and the prerequisites for citizens in a democratic society to perform their civic duties. The paper concludes that any regulation directed to content navigation algorithms should be subject to a lower standard of scrutiny, similar to the standard for commercial speech

Governing autonomous vehicles: emerging responses for safety, liability, privacy, cybersecurity, and industry risks

The benefits of autonomous vehicles (AVs) are widely acknowledged, but there are concerns about the extent of these benefits and AV risks and unintended consequences. In this article, we first examine AVs and different categories of the technological risks associated with them. We then explore strategies that can be adopted to address these risks, and explore emerging responses by governments for addressing AV risks. Our analyses reveal that, thus far, governments have in most instances avoided stringent measures in order to promote AV developments and the majority of responses are non-binding and focus on creating councils or working groups to better explore AV implications. The US has been active in introducing legislations to address issues related to privacy and cybersecurity. The UK and Germany, in particular, have enacted laws to address liability issues, other countries mostly acknowledge these issues, but have yet to implement specific strategies. To address privacy and cybersecurity risks strategies ranging from introduction or amendment of non-AV specific legislation to creating working groups have been adopted. Much less attention has been paid to issues such as environmental and employment risks, although a few governments have begun programmes to retrain workers who might be negatively affected.Comment: Transport Reviews, 201

Secure and Trustable Electronic Medical Records Sharing using Blockchain

Electronic medical records (EMRs) are critical, highly sensitive private information in healthcare, and need to be frequently shared among peers. Blockchain provides a shared, immutable and transparent history of all the transactions to build applications with trust, accountability and transparency. This provides a unique opportunity to develop a secure and trustable EMR data management and sharing system using blockchain. In this paper, we present our perspectives on blockchain based healthcare data management, in particular, for EMR data sharing between healthcare providers and for research studies. We propose a framework on managing and sharing EMR data for cancer patient care. In collaboration with Stony Brook University Hospital, we implemented our framework in a prototype that ensures privacy, security, availability, and fine-grained access control over EMR data. The proposed work can significantly reduce the turnaround time for EMR sharing, improve decision making for medical care, and reduce the overall costComment: AMIA 2017 Annual Symposium Proceeding

An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

Examined Lives: Informational Privacy and the Subject as Object

In the United States, proposals for informational privacy have proved enormously controversial. On a political level, such proposals threaten powerful data processing interests. On a theoretical level, data processors and other data privacy opponents argue that imposing restrictions on the collection, use, and exchange of personal data would ignore established understandings of property, limit individual freedom of choice, violate principles of rational information use, and infringe data processors\u27 freedom of speech. In this article, Professor Julie Cohen explores these theoretical challenges to informational privacy protection. She concludes that categorical arguments from property, choice, truth, and speech lack weight, and mask fundamentally political choices about the allocation of power over information, cost, and opportunity. Each debate, although couched in a rhetoric of individual liberty, effectively reduces individuals to objects of choices and trades made by others. Professor Cohen argues, instead, that the debate about data privacy protection should be grounded in an appreciation of the conditions necessary for individuals to develop and exercise autonomy in fact, and that meaningful autonomy requires a degree of freedom from monitoring, scrutiny, and categorization by others. The article concludes by calling for the design of both legal and technological tools for strong data privacy protection

Averting Robot Eyes

Home robots will cause privacy harms. At the same time, they can provide beneficial services—as long as consumers trust them. This Essay evaluates potential technological solutions that could help home robots keep their promises, avert their eyes, and otherwise mitigate privacy harms. Our goals are to inform regulators of robot-related privacy harms and the available technological tools for mitigating them, and to spur technologists to employ existing tools and develop new ones by articulating principles for avoiding privacy harms. We posit that home robots will raise privacy problems of three basic types: (1) data privacy problems; (2) boundary management problems; and (3) social/relational problems. Technological design can ward off, if not fully prevent, a number of these harms. We propose five principles for home robots and privacy design: data minimization, purpose specifications, use limitations, honest anthropomorphism, and dynamic feedback and participation. We review current research into privacy-sensitive robotics, evaluating what technological solutions are feasible and where the harder problems lie. We close by contemplating legal frameworks that might encourage the implementation of such design, while also recognizing the potential costs of regulation at these early stages of the technology