Playpen, the NIT, and Rule 41(b): Electronic “Searches” for Those Who Do Not Wish to be Found

In 2015, the FBI executed a massive online sting to catch users of child pornography websites using a special program, the Network Investigative Technique (NIT). One search warrant issued from a magistrate in Virginia allowed the FBI to deploy computer code on suspect computers across the nation. This article examines the differing federal circuit analysis regarding whether the Virginia magistrate had jurisdiction before and after the recent amendment to the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and if using the NIT over the internet even counts as a search under the Fourth Amendment

Unilateral Invasions of Privacy

Most people seem to agree that individuals have too little privacy, and most proposals to address that problem focus on ways to give those users more information about, and more control over, how information about them is used. Yet in nearly all cases, information subjects are not the parties who make decisions about how information is collected, used, and disseminated; instead, outsiders make unilateral decisions to collect, use, and disseminate information about others. These potential privacy invaders, acting without input from information subjects, are the parties to whom proposals to protect privacy must be directed. This Article develops a theory of unilateral invasions of privacy rooted in the incentives of potential outside invaders. It first briefly describes the different kinds of information flows that can result in losses of privacy and the private costs and benefits to the participants in these information flows. It argues that in many cases the relevant costs and benefits are those of an outsider deciding whether certain information flows occur. These outside invaders are more likely to act when their own private costs and benefits make particular information flows worthwhile, regardless of the effects on information subjects or on social welfare. And potential privacy invaders are quite sensitive to changes in these costs and benefits, unlike information subjects, for whom transaction costs can overwhelm incentives to make information more or less private. The Article then turns to privacy regulation, arguing that this unilateral-invasion theory sheds light on how effective privacy regulations should be designed. Effective regulations are those that help match the costs and benefits faced by a potential privacy invader with the costs and benefits to society of a given information flow. Law can help do so by raising or lowering the costs or benefits of a privacy invasion, but only after taking account of other costs and benefits faced by the potential privacy invader

Pictures in Your Mind: Using Interactive Gesture-Controlled Reliefs to Explore Art

Tactile reliefs offer many benefits over the more classic raised line drawings or tactile diagrams, as depth, 3D shape, and surface textures are directly perceivable. Although often created for blind and visually impaired (BVI) people, a wider range of people may benefit from such multimodal material. However, some reliefs are still difficult to understand without proper guidance or accompanying verbal descriptions, hindering autonomous exploration. In this work, we present a gesture-controlled interactive audio guide (IAG) based on recent low-cost depth cameras that can be operated directly with the hands on relief surfaces during tactile exploration. The interactively explorable, location-dependent verbal and captioned descriptions promise rapid tactile accessibility to 2.5D spatial information in a home or education setting, to online resources, or as a kiosk installation at public places. We present a working prototype, discuss design decisions, and present the results of two evaluation studies: the first with 13 BVI test users and the second follow-up study with 14 test users across a wide range of people with differences and difficulties associated with perception, memory, cognition, and communication. The participant-led research method of this latter study prompted new, significant and innovative developments

Redescribing Health Privacy: The Importance of Health Policy

Current conversations about health information policy often tend to be based on three broad assumptions. First, many perceive a tension between regulation and innovation. We often hear that privacy regulations are keeping researchers, companies, and providers from aggregating the data they need to promote innovation. Second, aggregation of fragmented data is seen as a threat to its proper regulation, creating the risk of breaches and other misuse. Third, a prime directive for technicians and policymakers is to give patients ever more granular methods of control over data. This article questions and complicates those assumptions, which I deem (respectively) the Privacy Threat to Research, the Aggregation Threat to Privacy, and the Control Solution. This article is also intended to enrich our concepts of “fragmentation” and “integration” in health care. There is a good deal of sloganeering around “firewalls” and “vertical integration” as idealized implementations of “fragmentation” and “integration” (respective). The problem, though, is that terms like these (as well as “disruption”) are insufficiently normative to guide large-scale health system change. They describe, but they do not adequately prescribe. By examining those instances where: a) regulation promotes innovation, and b) increasing (some kinds of) availability of data actually enhances security, confidentiality, and privacy protections, this article attempts to give a richer account of the ethics of fragmentation and integration in the U.S. health care system. But, it also has a darker side, highlighting the inevitable conflicts of values created in a “reputation society” driven by stigmatizing social sorting systems. Personal data control may exacerbate social inequalities. Data aggregation may increase both our powers of research and our vulnerability to breach. The health data policymaking landscape of the next decade will feature a series of intractable conflicts between these important social values

Fighting Cybercrime After \u3cem\u3eUnited States v. Jones\u3c/em\u3e

In a landmark non-decision last term, five Justices of the United States Supreme Court would have held that citizens possess a Fourth Amendment right to expect that certain quantities of information about them will remain private, even if they have no such expectations with respect to any of the information or data constituting that whole. This quantitative approach to evaluating and protecting Fourth Amendment rights is certainly novel and raises serious conceptual, doctrinal, and practical challenges. In other works, we have met these challenges by engaging in a careful analysis of this “mosaic theory” and by proposing that courts focus on the technologies that make collecting and aggregating large quantities of information possible. In those efforts, we focused on reasonable expectations held by “the people” that they will not be subjected to broad and indiscriminate surveillance. These expectations are anchored in Founding-era concerns about the capacity for unfettered search powers to promote an authoritarian surveillance state. Although we also readily acknowledged that there are legitimate and competing governmental and law enforcement interests at stake in the deployment and use of surveillance technologies that implicate reasonable interests in quantitative privacy, we did little more. In this Article, we begin to address that omission by focusing on the legitimate governmental and law enforcement interests at stake in preventing, detecting, and prosecuting cyber-harassment and healthcare fraud

Using Google Analytics Data to Expand Discovery and Use of Digital Archival Content

This article presents opportunities for the use of Google Analytics, a popular and freely available web analytics tool, to inform decision making for digital archivists managing online digital archives content. Emphasis is placed on the analysis of Google Analytics data to increase the visibility and discoverability of content. The article describes the use of Google Analytics to support fruitful digital outreach programs, to guide metadata creation for enhancing access, and to measure user demand to aid selection for digitization. Valuable reports, features, and tools in Google Analytics are identified and the use of these tools to gather meaningful data is explained