Tag: privacy

Challenging Normalized Surveillance: “Birds on the Wire” Surveillance in Mexico

Mariel Garcia-Montes August 6, 2024
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In Mexican slang, “hay pájaros en el alambre” (there are birds on the wire), is an expression used to imply that a private conversation is at risk of being intentionally overheard. Birds on the wire can mean anything from one’s auntie overhearing a conversation from the other room, to a phone being wiretapped at long range by a state agency. In everyday parlance, this phrase does a lot of work to signal a broader awareness and cultural acceptance of surveillance. If, in conversation, someone is reminded of the birds on the wire, they are expected to beware—not for the birds to go away. Perhaps the statement produces a chilling effect of sorts, rather than an expectation of privacy. (read more...)

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Period Tracking Apps: Something Old, Something New

Andrea Ford November 12, 2019

They’re sleek and colorful, “fun and easy”, full of icons and dials. Period tracking apps, or “menstruapps,” are an increasingly common way a large segment of the population attends to their health and embodied experience of menstruation. In some ways, these apps are part of very recent trends towards the Quantified Self, the datafication of health, and reliance on biometric tracking devices to “optimize” one’s habits. In other ways, they evoke older legacies of feminist health care, notably the Our Bodies, Ourselves movement begun in 1969. Fifty years later, what does it mean to use technology to “understand how your body works”, as Clue advertises, or “take control of your body,” the tagline for Natural Cycles, which are two of the most popular menstruapps? (read more...)

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Data Doppelgängers and Issues of Consent

noopur raval May 22, 2018

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth post in our Law in Computation series. In February 2018, journalist Kashmir Hill wrote about her collaboration with researcher Surya Mattu to make her (Hill’s) home as “smart” as possible. They wanted to see what they could learn about privacy, both from the perspective of living in such a house and from the ‘data fumes’ or ‘data exhaust’ of all these smart appliances themselves. Data fumes or exhaust refer to the traces we leave behind when we interact digitally but also, often, information that we provide to sign-up on digital platforms (gender, location, relationships etc). These traces, when aligned and collated with our daily digital behaviours on social media, e-commerce and Search platforms, are vital to the speculative and dynamic constructions of who we might be. (read more...)

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Privacy and Piracy: Investigating Unauthorized Online Gaming

Evan Conaway February 8, 2018

Editor’s Note: This is the third post in our Law in Computation series. When we play an online game like World of Warcraft, where are we? This is not just a metaphysical question—are we in the fantasy world of Azeroth or in front of our computers—but a legal one as well. And there are multiple answers to that legal question. We might take a look at the space of intellectual property at the level of code and creation, whether corporate or by the players. There is also the space of law within the game, of the rules and norms guiding play (De Zwart and Humphreys 2014). What I’m concerned with here, though, are the servers, located in physical places, that connect players through infrastructures of connection whose worlds are sometimes disconnected by proprietary and computational decisions of game world owners. Servers keep online games alive. When online gamers talk about a game world being disconnected, they often point to the server as being “unplugged” or “turned off.” While official game servers are typically owned by game developers and corporations, players are now harnessing this power themselves, using privately-owned servers (“private servers”) as a viable solution for restoring and sustaining older versions of online games previously consigned to oblivion. But why? (read more...)

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Finding a ‘Home’ Online

Jasmine McNealy September 23, 2016

An oft-repeated mantra in scholarship on privacy is that you have the greatest expectation of privacy inside of your home, and the least expectation of privacy in public. What this means is that you can legitimately assume what happens inside your home will stay in your home (to use a phrasing usually connected with visits to Las Vegas). But if people can view or hear an event or occurrence, whether you are having an argument on your cellphone or you trip, fall, and people can see it without technological assistance, you cannot reasonably believe that what happened will remain ‘private.’ This perspective permeates law and how cases involving privacy and the use of personal information are resolved. But in an era in which many people live their lives online where some much is publicly accessible, what does the concept of home mean and how should it influence how we view privacy? (read more...)

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The Problem of Expecting Privacy on Social Media

Jasmine McNealy July 19, 2016

In May of this year, Danish researchers released a data set containing the profile information of 70,000 OkCupid users. OkCupid is a free online dating site to which, as you would expect, users post information in hopes of making a connection. The researchers collected this data by scraping the site, or using code that captures the information available. The data set included usernames, locations, and the answers to the personal questions related to user dating, sexuality, and sexual preferences. In other words, the researchers published personal information that the dating site users would expect to remain, at least theoretically, among the other members of the dating site, and could also be used to discover the users’ real names. But should OkCupid users, and the denizens of social media in general, expect what they post online to not be made “public”? In my last blog post, I briefly pondered the normalization of doxxing and what that means for privacy online. My question, for the most part, was whether courts would see how common doxxing has become as an indication that it is not as highly offensive to a reasonable person as necessary for a judgment of invasion of privacy. In that post I focused on doxxing by individuals, and sometimes the media. It’s important to note, however, that researchers have begun to participate in the same kind of behavior with little to no remorse. Which leads to what I think is the overarching question of what expectation of privacy people can have in information that they place on social media or connected sites like newspaper comment forums or review sites like Yelp. (read more...)

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The Hulk, Doxxing, and Changing Standards of Privacy

Jasmine McNealy May 17, 2016

By now you’ve probably heard the verdict in the Bollea v. Gawker case, the formal name of the lawsuit that Hulk Hogan (Terry Bollea being his legal name) filed against the online news site Gawker. The jury awarded the Hulkster with $140 million in damages for invasion of privacy after Gawker posted a one-minute segment of a sex tape featuring the wrestler with the wife of his best friend Bubba the Love Sponge. If you got a chance to watch the trial, or a least read about what was happening, you’d know that it was very entertaining, particularly for a media/info/tech law nerd such as myself. You should also know that Hulk has unfinished business with Gawker, having recently (as of May 3, 2016) filed another lawsuit against the media organization and others claiming emotional distress. Bollea v. Gawker, as humorous as it was, is perhaps not as important as (read more...)

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