Privacy Law\u27s Precautionary Principle Problem

Privacy law today faces two interrelated problems. The first is an information control problem. Like so many other fields of modern cyberlaw—intellectual property, online safety, cybersecurity, etc.—privacy law is being challenged by intractable Information Age realties. Specifically, it is easier than ever before for information to circulate freely and harder than ever to bottle it up once it is released. This has not slowed efforts to fashion new rules aimed at bottling up those information flows. If anything, the pace of privacy-related regulatory proposals has been steadily increasing in recent years even as these information control challenges multiply. This has led to privacy law’s second major problem: the precautionary principle problem. The precautionary principle generally holds that new innovations should be curbed or even forbidden until they are proven safe. Fashioning privacy rules based on precautionary principle reasoning necessitates prophylactic regulation that makes new forms of digital innovations guilty until proven innocent. This puts privacy law on a collision course with the general freedom to innovate that has thus far powered the Internet revolution, and privacy law threatens to limit innovations consumers have come to expect or even raise prices for services consumers currently receive free of charge. As a result, even if new regulations are pursued or imposed, there will likely be formidable push-up not just from affected industries but also from their consumers. In light of both of these information control and precautionary principle problems, new approaches to privacy protection are necessary. We need to invert the process of how we go about protecting privacy by focusing more on practical “bottom-up” solution—education, empowerment, public and media pressure, social norms and etiquette, industry self-regulation and best practices, and an enhanced role for privacy professionals within organizations—instead of “top-down” legalistic solutions and regulatory techo-fixes. Resources expended on top-down regulatory pursuits should instead be put into bottom-up efforts to help citizens better prepare for an uncertain future. In this regard, policymakers can draw important lessons form the debate over how best to protect children from objectionable online content. In a sense, there is nothing new under the sun; the current debate over privacy protection has many parallels with earlier debates about how best to protect online child safety. Most notably, just as top-down regulatory constraints came to be viewed as even be workable in the long-run for protecting online child safety, the same will likely be true for most privacy related regulatory enactments. This article sketches out some general lessons from those online safety debates and discusses their implications for privacy policy going forward

THE WORKING LIVES AND SPATIAL PRACTICE OF DIGITAL MEDIA DEVELOPERS IN SAN FRANCISCO

In this dissertation I examine work practices in the 21st Century, looking in particular at how categories such as labor and value are changing in the context of technological shifts and the valorization of entrepreneurial work. I take the example of digital media workers in San Francisco to show how work is changing in relation to correlative changes in the capitalist mode of production and the devaluation of labor under neoliberal models of reason. This approach interrogates how attachments toward work are produced and reproduced to ask why work has become such a naturalized and unquestionable category in everyday life. Rather than demanding less or better work, entrepreneurs in San Francisco work more and harder, while providing a romanticized ideal of work for others. I ask if standards of precarious, insecure, flexible, and discriminatory work practices are transmitted beyond the confines of digital media work, and become a normative and hegemonic standard for workers in general. By examining these working practices and ethics of software developers in San Francisco’s digital media sector, I address recent calls in cultural economic and critical human geography to pay closer attention to the micro-spatiality of the workplace (rather than the more typical industry- or market-scale focus) and to consider issues of embodiment, emotions, affect, gendered performativity, and the production of sexuality at work. This dissertation attends to topics of inter-disciplinary appeal, including the production of software, precarious labor in a cultural industry, and the role of culture and emotions in the workplace. I view the workplace as a site not just for the production of economic forms of value, but also behaviors and attitudes toward work, working subjectivities, and structures of affect and desire. I take up three main topics: (1) entrepreneurs’ and other workers’ personal attachment to their work, (2) users of social media platforms as unremunerated producers (or ‘prosumers’) of value, and (3) the use of the sharing trope to form a justification for flexible and contract work in the on-demand economy. I draw on eighteen months of fieldwork in San Francisco with workers for digital media firms, presenting data collected through interviews, participant observation, and discourse analysis

Trust in Academia: How Chief Academic Officers Build and Maintain Faculty Trust

As the role of academic leadership has grown more complex, particularly as leaders are increasingly tasked with leading educational innovation initiatives, building faculty trust has become an essential task for chief academic officers (CAOs). Due to the general lack of research into this role, though, little is known about how they understand and approach building faculty trust. The purpose of this qualitative, single, holistic case study was to understand how executive academic administrators at private colleges approach building and maintaining trust with their faculty in general and also through educational innovation and what specific challenges they have identified in these efforts. By using a social constructionist paradigm, semistructured 90-minute interviews were conducted with a semipurposive sample of six CAOs selected from within the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities in New York. The respondents answered open-ended questions concerning how they define trust in leaders, what specific actions they have taken to build trust among their faculty, and what challenges they have faced in trust-building. They were then asked these same questions but specifically within the context of educational innovation initiatives they have overseen. The interviews were transcribed and coded in three passes, first using predetermined codes related to trust and innovation, then using process coding, and a final pass using values coding. The findings indicated that respondents recognized that trust was essential for effective faculty leadership and that while trust was not often built intentionally, they sought to build it through open and honest communication, by preserving institutional mission, and by understanding the role of the faculty. Additionally, the respondents indicated that innovation is different in top-down versus bottom-up initiatives, that identifying faculty to lead innovation and leading alongside them builds trust, as does incentivizing innovation. Based on these findings, it is recommended that CAOs should work to build trust more intentionally, that communication skills should factor heavily into the selection and ongoing training of CAOs, along with training CAOs in the preservation of institutional mission, that innovation should be incentivized by institutions, and that faculty leadership programs should be established to build innovative leaders that the CAO works alongside

‘Pandemia’: a reckoning of UK universities’ corporate response to COVID-19 and its academic fallout:A reckoning of UK universities’ corporate response to COVID-19 and its academic fallout.

Universities in the UK, and in other countries like Australia and the USA, have responded to the operational and financial challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic by prioritising institutional solvency and enforcing changes to the work-practices and profiles of their staff. For academics, an adjustment to institutional life under COVID-19 has been dramatic and resulted in the overwhelming majority making a transition to prolonged remote-working. Many have endured significant work intensification; others have lost — or may soon lose — their jobs. The impact of the pandemic appears transformational and for the most part negative. This article reports the experiences of n=1,099 UK academics specific to the corporate response of institutional leadership to the COVID-19 crisis. We find articulated a story of universities in the grip of 'pandemia' and COVID-19 emboldening processes and protagonists of neoliberal governmentality and market-reform that pay little heed to considerations of human health and wellbeing

The Internet of Things and Wearable Technology: Addressing Privacy and Security Concerns without Derailing Innovation

The next great wave of Internet-enabled innovation has arrived, and it is poised to revolutionize the way humans interact with the world around them. This paper highlights some of the opportunities presented by the rise of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) in general and wearable technology in particular and encourages policymakers to allow these technologies to develop in a relatively unabated fashion