data
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Written by a Human (For Now)
Just a quick follow-up to my last post, discussing the possible consequences for constitutional law of the increasing role of algorithms in the (re-)creation of information. While that post, and Josh Blackman’s essay on which it was based,focused on search engines, a post on The Guardian’s website this weekend discusses the “writing” of actual news Continue reading
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Charter, Meet Google
Josh Blackman has just published a fascinating new essay, “What Happens if Data Is Speech?” in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law Online, asking some important questions about how courts should treat ― and how we should think about ― attempts to regulate the (re)creation and arrangement of information by “algorithms parsing data” (25). Continue reading
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Not Private Parties
The development and use of massive voter databases and sophisticated “micro-targeting” techniques by political parties are raising concerns about the privacy rights of the people targeted by these efforts. When I wrote about the use of these techniques by the Obama campaign in the last presidential election in the United States, I suggested that “the Continue reading
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The Future is Even Creepier
There is an interesting story in today’s New York Times that brings together a couple of my recent topics, the tracking of internet users by the websites they visit and the use of the data thus generated in advertising, about which I wrote here, and the use of target-specific outreach and advertising by President Obama’s Continue reading
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The Future Is Creepy
I had the chance today to be at a talk by two of the members of the legal “brain-trust” of President Obama’s re-election campaign, NYU’s professors Rick Pildes and Sam Issacharoff. (I have to brag: it was one of those moments that make NYU the best law school in the world.) Yet although they spoke Continue reading
Double Aspect 