Georgetown Law
Technology Review

INTRODUCTION San Francisco is the home of the platform economy. Uber and Airbnb—the poster children of that economy—launched their initial products in the city and used the feedback garnered from Bay Area users to perfect their business models. These and other platform companies also started to build their loyal user bases with Bay Area consumers. […]

INTRODUCTION The rapid progress of technology challenges traditional application of the Fourth Amendment. As law enforcement’s technological capabilities advance, judges have had to wrangle with what constitutes a search and seizure. Past precedent generally remains unhelpful unless new technology can be analogized to past technology. To combat this, the Supreme Court recognized the need to […]

INTRODUCTION  On June 19th, 2017, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a North Carolina law (hereinafter referred to as “statute”) that effectively instituted a social media ban for registered sex offenders. The statute made it a felony for a registered sex offender to “access a commercial social networking Web site where the sex offender knows that […]

INTRODUCTION When Samsung and Apple, both dominators of the smartphone market, went head-to-head in the Supreme Court in Samsung Electronics Co. v. Apple, Inc., the Supreme Court refused to “resolve whether, for each of the design patents at issue [in Samsung], the relevant article of manufacture is the smartphone, or a particular smartphone component,” or […]

INTRODUCTION  When an employee leaves a company for a competitor, there is a concern that trade secrets and confidential information belonging to the company may leave for the competitor as well. Protecting trade secrets is important in order for businesses to remain technologically competitive. The following case raises important questions about what constitutes a trade […]

INTRODUCTION Fraud is a seemingly easy concept to understand. By definition, it describes the actions of a person “deliberately deceiving someone else with the intent of causing damage.” However, various jurisdictions within the United States qualify both the act of fraud and the related offenses differently. These varying perspectives alone can lend themselves to numerous […]

INTRODUCTION Recent technological innovations have led to an increasing number of devices connecting to the Internet, which in turn collect and store user data. The expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) industry raises new privacy and security concerns for users of these devices. One surprising area of concern is children’s privacy and security in […]

INTRODUCTION: ANONYMIZATION USING TOR Between February 20 and March 4, 2015, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) administered and monitored a child pornography website in an effort to identify those who accessed the website’s illicit content. This website, “Playpen,” had more than 150,000 users worldwide. The FBI’s investigation was known as “Operation Pacifier.” […]

INTRODUCTION: HACKING AND SOCIETY Nearly ubiquitous in today’s online culture, “hacking” has generally reclaimed the benign spirit the word once held in the early days of electronics, throwing off the more nefarious meaning it held throughout the tail end of the twentieth century. The word “lifehacks”—a technique for accomplishing a familiar task more easily and […]

INTRODUCTION After years of anticipation, the era of telemedicine has finally arrived. It has been nearly a decade since doctors, insurance companies, and other health care professionals predicted a telemedicine revolution. Telemedicine literally means “healing from a distance” and involves the direct treatment and prevention of diseases and injuries by healthcare professionals at a distance. […]

LAW ENFORCEMENT’S HISTORY OF TRACKING SUSPECTS Locating and tracking individuals is often a vital component of law enforcement operations. Throughout its history, American law enforcement has continually adopted new methods and technologies to track suspects with greater efficiency. Nineteenth-century state governments employed bounty hunters to track suspects across state lines, while some twentieth-century agencies used […]

INTRODUCTION Searching the word “algorithm” on Google leads to images of spider-web charts, three-dimensional graphs and rows of mathematic equations. What could social media and math have to do with each other? Looking at the motive behind social media companies tells us why algorithms are an inseparable part of social media platforms. SOCIAL MEDIA AS […]

INTRODUCTION As technology continues to develop and as citizens increasingly embrace a digital society, consumers accordingly consider methods to better protect their privacy. One method, the virtual private network (VPN), was developed in 1996 to address that need. A VPN is a secured network that protects data by creating a secure connection that shields those […]

DIGITAL INFORMATION’S MODERN CONTEXT: A DATA SECURITY CRISIS Major breaches to corporate information systems, such as Equifax’s 2017 data breach, have shown the vulnerabilities of many data security practices. These highly public failures have created some of the most significant headlines of the early twenty-first century, forcing data security experts to rethink their methods for […]