WUSTL School of Law, Cambridge organize first International Privacy Law Conference June 26 and 27
Leading privacy law experts from around the world will gather in Cambridge, England, on June 26 and 27 for the first International Privacy Law conference, a joint effort between Washington University in St. Louis School of law and the University of Cambridge. “Every modern society is confronting novel issues of privacy, and our conference brings together some of the smartest thinkers about privacy in the world to compare notes and come up with new solutions,” says Neil M. Richards, JD, conference co-chair and professor of law at Washington University. Conference topics will include intellectual privacy, the conflict between privacy and free speech, the psychology of privacy, public access to court records, and privacy reform in Australia.
Twitter subpoenas a challenge to intellectual privacy
The City of New York recently subpoenaed a Twitter account as part of an ongoing Occupy Wall Street criminal case. The Occupy protester named in the case is challenging the subpoena. Privacy law expert Neil Richards, JD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, says that it’s not surprising that law enforcement groups are interested in accessing the volume of records relating to our speech that social media platforms generate. “By and large, this data should remain private, and online companies should keep the data confidential and not share it any more broadly than we as users and speakers want it to be shared,” Richards says.
Weakening Video Privacy Protection Act a dangerous attack on intellectual privacy
Most people would rather not have their video viewing habits easily available to the public — no need for co-workers to know about your love of reality TV. The Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 (VPPA) protects these records, but the House of Representatives — at the urging of Netflix and Facebook — recently voted to amend the VPPA, allowing companies to share movie watching habits much more easily. “What’s at stake is intellectual privacy — the idea that records of our reading habits, movie watching habits and private conversations deserve special protection from other kinds of personal information,” says Neil Richards, JD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.