We’re increasingly bringing surveillance upon ourselves with the devices we use. These devices are gathering an enormous amount of our data, and this information is readily available for the government to access.
Professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson tackles the implications of these developments in his new book, Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance.
Unlike 160+ countries, unlike almost every industrialized nation, the U.S. has been an outlier because it lacks a comprehensive privacy law. Congress has been trying repeatedly to pass one, without luck, an effort that has faltered because such a law involves many complicated issues that require thoughtfulness and compromise, which don’t exist in Congress these days.
Congress’s latest foray is a new bill called the SECURE Data Act, a piece of garbage cooked up by Republicans as a gift to industry in a climate where the public is deeply concerned about privacy, outraged at the harms tech is causing, and yearning for ways to hold Big Tech accountable.
I can’t stress enough how awful this bill is. On balance, if passed into law, it will do dramatic harm to privacy. It will leave people less protected than if it didn’t exist. I’d call it more of an anti-privacy law than a privacy law.
I’ll briefly provide a few reasons why this bill is terrible and should not be passed.
Watch Daniel Solove and Jonathon Penney discuss his book, Chilling Effects and how law, surveillance, and technology is being weaponized to chill and control us, and what to do about it.
Watch Daniel Solove and Jacob Ward discuss about the dangers of AI being used to manipulate and control people.
AI and digital technologies have been unleashed upon us, with an unprecedented zeal and recklessness, and a reckoning is long overdue.
The Meta and YouTube $6 million addiction verdict this week is an important milestone. I’m not an expert on the addiction issue, so I won’t opine on the merits of the case. Instead, I want to point out how the case affects the bigger picture of accountability for technology and AI.
Watch Daniel Solove and Omer Tene (Goodwin) discuss the latest developments in privacy and AI law.
This year, in Chatrie v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether geofence warrants are valid under the Fourth Amendment. The geofence warrant at issue in the case was one that allowed the government to obtain account data from Google of hundreds of millions of users. It’s the equivalent to a digital dragnet, which I’ve long argued contravenes the core purpose of the Fourth Amendment. The Framers of the Constitution hated dragnet searches . . . actually, to be more precise, HATED them.
If the Supreme Court doesn’t find geofence warrants to be invalid, then it’s hard to imagine much left of the already-desiccated Fourth Amendment. But Chatrie is just the tip of the iceberg. Regular warrants under the Fourth Amendment—those that are properly circumscribed based on particularized suspicion—are also not strong enough for our times.
We’re witnessing an unprecedented rise of authoritarianism in the United States. I’ve long argued that warrants are an effective way to protect privacy and also balance interests in law enforcement. But now I don’t think warrants are enough to provide the kind of protection against government power that is necessary.
Watch Daniel Solove’s discussion with Amelia Vance (Public Interest Privacy Center) on the latest developments in children’s privacy.
This year’s Superbowl was a showcase for how out of touch tech companies are when it comes to privacy and AI. Several ads demonstrated that tech companies are obtuse about the dystopia they’re creating.
Hopefully, public reaction will get through to policymakers that the tone deafness of tech companies reveals a deeper disconnect between the future they seek to bring about and the future most in society want. Tech companies aren’t going to take us to the promised land; they’ll take us to hell instead unless policymakers take bold steps to ensure they don’t.
