I enjoyed a number of AALS panels that I attended and thought it might be worthwhile to pass on some of the interesting issues discussed there to folks reading the blog, especially students looking for issues to write about for paper courses and student Notes.
The Privacy and Defamation section meeting had an all-star information privacy lineup. Daniel Solove moderated the discussion of panelists Julie Cohen, Neil Richards, Pamela Samuelson, Paul Schwartz, and Lior Strahilevitz. The panelists highlighted neglected/emerging issues that they think deserve scholarly attention. Examples included: (1) empirical work on privacy issues, such as studies of corporate data-privacy practices, (2) the comparative competency of institutions addressing privacy issues (state AG offices, state consumer protection boards, self-regulatory industry groups, etc.), (3) our changing conceptions of privacy given society’s increasing use of social networking sites and the impending use of cellphones to connect with friends and strangers, (4) lessons learned from recently de-classified government documents related to surveillance activities of the 1960s to evaluate today’s government surveillance efforts in this post-9/11 era, and (5) our understanding of identity in the twenty-first century.
The panel fielded a number of interesting questions from the attendees. A participant asked about the propriety of law enforcement’s use of face-searching technologies to identify potential criminals from pictures posted on social networking sites such as MySpace. For example, a college student posts a picture of friends smoking pot. Using advanced face-identification software, police identify the individuals in the photo and follow up with arrests (or desk appearance tickets). The panel asked whether we want to encourage the use of such technologies by law enforcement given the attendant sacrifice of privacy with their use.
Pamela Samuelson and Julie Cohen also discussed the UnBlinking symposium held at Berkeley in November 2006. At that conference, academics from different disciplines gathered to address the effect that our “environment of unblinking eyes” will have on privacy and our behavior in public and private spaces in the twenty-first century. The symposium has a Wiki.
More AALS Highlights to follow this week.
Posted by Danielle Citron on January 21, 2007 at 04:21 PM
Comments
Thanks for the nice summary of our panel!
Posted by: Daniel J. Solove | Jan 22, 2007 11:46:32 PM