Teaching UbiComp with Sense

Modern computer science education has to take account of the recent changes towards smart ubiquitous computing devices. In addition, existing programming languages are needlessly difficult for novice programmers to learn concepts. We have developed Sense, an extension to the graphical programming language Scratch, and an associated sensor/actuator board. Together, these will allow novice undergraduate students to quickly develop their own smart devices while learning the fundamentals of programming. Students will first study with Sense in 2011 but developmental feedback has been positive

Summer of Code: Assisting Distance-Learning Students with Open-Ended Programming Tasks

A significant difficulty in teaching programming lies in the transition from novice to intermediate programmer, characterised by the assimilation and use of schemas of standard programming approaches. A significant factor assisting this transition is practice with tasks which develop this schema use. We describe the Summer of Code, a two-week activity for part-time, distance-learning students which gave them some additional programming practice. We analysed their submissions, forum postings, and results of a terminal survey. We found learners were keen to share and discuss their solutions and persevered with individual problems and the challenge overall. 93% respondents rated the activity 3 or better on a 5-point Likert scale (n=58). However, a quarter of participants, mainly those who described themselves as average or poor programmers, felt less confident in their abilities after the activity, though half of these students liked the activity overall. 54% of all participants said the greatest challenge was developing a general approach to the problems, such as selecting appropriate data structures. This is corroborated by forum comments, where students greatly appreciated “think aloud” presentations by faculty tackling the problems. These results strongly suggest that students would benefit from more open-ended practice, where they have to select and design their own solutions to a range of problems

Why Data Privacy Law Is (Mostly) Constitutional

Laws regulating the collection, use, and disclosure of personal data are (mostly) constitutional, and critics who suggest otherwise are wrong. Since the New Deal, American law has rested on the wise judgment that, by and large, commercial regulation should be made on the basis of economic and social policy, rather than blunt constitutional rules. This has become one of the basic principles of American constitutional law. Although some observers have suggested that the United States Supreme Court’s recent decision in Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc. changes this state of affairs, such readings are incorrect. Sorrell involved a challenge to a poorly drafted Vermont law that discriminated on the basis of both content and viewpoint. Such a law would have been unconstitutional if it had regulated even unprotected speech. As the Sorrell Court made clear, the real problem with the Vermont law at issue was that it did not regulate enough, unlike the “more coherent policy” of the undoubtedly constitutional federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Data privacy law should thus rarely be thought of as implicating serious constitutional difficulties, and this is a good thing. As we move into the digital age, in which more and more of our society is affected or constituted by data flows, we face a similar threat. If “data” were somehow “speech,” virtually every economic law would become clouded by constitutional doubt. Economic or commercial policy affecting data flows—which is to say all economic or social policy—would become almost impossible. This might be a valid policy choice, but it is not one that the First Amendment commands. Any radical suggestions to the contrary are unsupported by our constitutional law. In a democratic society, the basic contours of information policy must ultimately be up to the people and their policy-making representatives, and not to unelected judges. We should decide policy on that basis, rather than on odd readings of the First Amendment

Foreword: The Rehnquist Court and the First Amendment

This paper introduces the question -- what will be the legacy of the Rehnquist Court? Although it is too early to say with certainty, it is safe to hazard a guess that it will be remembered as a relatively conservative Court, particularly interested in policing the lines between federal and state power in areas such as the federal commerce power, state sovereign immunity, and criminal procedure. Indeed, it is in these areas that the “Rehnquist Court” is most aptly named, for William Rehnquist was a leader of the Court’s doctrinal evolution in these areas in a number of ways. Despite the Court’s emphasis on federalism and constitutional criminal law, issues of First Amendment law remained consistently at the top of the docket in terms of importance. Over its two decades, the Rehnquist Court grappled with a host of fundamental First Amendment issues, involving a panoply of questions basic to any free society. Among many others, it addressed questions of flag burning, hate speech, sexually-explicit speech, speech in the digital environment, free speech versus the right to privacy, free speech and the regulation of intellectual property, the scope of the rights of expressive association and religious free exercise,9 and the prohibition on the establishment of religion

The Puzzle of Brandeis, Privacy, and Speech

The Right to Privacy\u27 and his dissent in Olmstead v. United States. In The Right to Privacy, Brandeis and Samuel Warren argued that intrusion into and public disclosure of private affairs by the press was deeply hurtful, and that the common law should be read to recognize a tort remedy for such violations. Their short article is considered by scholars to have established not just the privacy torts but the field of privacy law itself. Brandeis is also famous (though less so) for his Olmstead dissent-a document which introduced modern concepts of privacy into constitutional law, and ultimately led not only to the reasonable expectation of privacy test that governs Fourth Amendment law,4 but also shaped the constitutional right to privacy recognized in Griswold v. Connecticut5 and Roe v. Wade. While sounding good in theory, the right to privacy has proven hard to apply in practice. From its earliest recognition by the common law, and particularly since the 1960s, tort privacy has conflicted with First Amendment rights of free speech and press. Over the years, the conflict between privacy and speech has generated a substantial literature. Important litigation has also examined the constitutionality of privacy rights under the First Amendment, with the First Amendment usually prevailing. An important theme running throughout these cases and commentary is that privacy and speech are in irreconcilable conflict. The assumed conflict between privacy and speech reveals a puzzle. In addition to establishing the modern legal conception of privacy, Brandeis is also a central figure in the genesis of First Amendment law. In a series of separate opinions in free speech cases from 1919-1925, Justice Brandeis articulated a more robust notion of the First Amendment that has subsequently become the dominant one in American constitutional law.\u270 Brandeis\u27s most important contribution to this tradition is his opinion in Whitney v. California, which Vincent Blasi has called arguably the most important essay ever written, on or off the bench, on the meaning of the First Amendment

The Surprising Virtues of Data Loyalty

Lawmakers in the United States and Europe are seriously considering imposing duties of data loyalty that implement ideas from privacy law scholarship, but critics claim such duties are unnecessary, unworkable, overly individualistic, and indeterminately vague. This paper takes those criticisms seriously, and its analysis of them reveals that duties of data loyalty have surprising virtues. Loyalty, it turns out, can support collective well-being by embracing privacy’s relational turn; it can be a powerful state of mind for reenergizing privacy reform; it prioritizes human values rather than potentially empty formalism; and it offers solutions that are flexible and clear rather than vague and indeterminate. We propose five contexts in which specific rules should supplement a general duty of data loyalty: collection, personalization, gatekeeping, influencing, and mediation. Loyalty can be a key policy tool with which to take on the related problems of information capitalism, platform power, and the use of personal data to manufacture consent to objectionable data practices. In fact, loyalty may well be the critical missing piece of the regulatory toolkit for privacy

Trusting Big Data Research

Although it might puzzle or even infuriate data scientists, suspicion about big data is understandable. The concept doesn’t seem promising to most people. It seems scary. This is partly because big data research is shrouded in mystery. People are unsure about organizations’ motives and methods. What do companies think they know about us? Are they keeping their insights safe from hackers? Are they selling their insights to unscrupulous parties? Most importantly, do organizations use our personal information against us? Big data research will only overcome its suspicious reputation when people can trust it. Some scholars and commentators have proposed review processes as an answer to big data’s credibility problem. It is possible that a review process for big data research could provide the oversight to ensure the ethical use of data we’ve been hoping for, applying sensible procedural rules to regularize data science. But procedure alone isn’t enough. In this essay, we argue that to truly protect data subjects, organizations must embrace the notion of trust when they use data about or to affect their human users, employees, or customers. Promoting meaningful trust will involves structuring procedures around affirmative, substantive obligations designed to ensure organizations act as proper stewards of the data with which they are entrusted. To overcome the failures of a compliance mentality, companies must vow to be Protective, Discreet, Honest, and above all, Loyal to data subjects. Such commitments backed up by laws will help ensure that companies are as vulnerable to us as we are to them. When we know we can trust those using big data, the concept might not seem so scary after all. We will disclose more and more accurate information in safe, sustainable ways. And we will all be better off

The Pathologies of Digital Consent

Consent permeates both our law and our lives—particularly in the digital context. Consent is the foundation of the relationships we have with search engines, social networks, commercial web sites, and any one of the dozens of other digitally mediated businesses we interact with regularly. We are frequently asked to consent to terms of service, privacy notices, the use of cookies, and so many other commercial practices. Consent is important, but it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. As scholars have documented, while consent models permeate the digital consumer landscape, the practical conditions of these agreements fall far short of the gold standard of knowing and voluntary consent. Yet as scholars, advocates, and consumers, we lack a common vocabulary for talking about the different ways in which digital consents can be flawed. This article offers four contributions to improve our understanding of consent in the digital world. First, we offer a conceptual vocabulary of “the pathologies of consent”—a framework for talking about different kinds of defects that consent models can suffer, including unwitting consent, coerced consent, and incapacitated consent. Second, we offer three conditions for when consent will be most valid in the digital context: when choice is infrequent, when the potential harms resulting from that choice are vivid and easy to imagine, and where we have the correct incentives choose consciously and seriously. The further we fall from these conditions, we argue, the more a particular consent will be pathological and thus suspect. Third, we argue that our theory of consent pathologies sheds light on the so-called “privacy paradox”—the notion that there is a gap between what consumers say about wanting privacy and what they actually do in practice. Understanding the “privacy paradox” in terms of consent pathologies shows how consumers are not hypocrites who say one thing but do another. On the contrary, the pathologies of consent reveal how consumers can be nudged and manipulated by powerful companies against their actual interests, and that this process is easier when consumer protection law falls far from the gold standard. In light of these findings, we offer a fourth contribution—the theory of consumer trust we have suggested in prior work and which we further elaborate here as an alternative to an over-reliance on increasingly pathological models of consent