Georgetown Law
Technology Review

The collection of personal data by private companies has received widespread attention both in the media and in popular discourse, and it is increasingly focused on the way that personal data may be used to the detriment of concerned individuals without much recourse. But governmental entities have also collected vast amounts of personal information, and […]

This Essay distills some preliminary thoughts about the value of a positive political theory of data governance in law from remarks given at the 2022 Georgetown Law Technology Review Symposium. What do I mean by “positive political theory”? Typically, the interests recognized and operationalized by law in data about people are indexed via negative rights […]

What would you think if you were pursuing the news and you read the headline New Privacy Law to Have Major Impact on Government Data? A new privacy law may strike you as a much-needed response to the ways government entities are using personal data to track us and make data analytics-based decisions about our […]

Note: this essay draws from my monograph Data and Democracy at Work: Advanced Information Technologies, Labor Law, and the New Working Class, MIT Press (forthcoming Dec. 2022). The COVID-19 pandemic upended our economy, but not our systems of class or racial hierarchy. A major factor in individuals’ total risk was whether they can work remotely, […]

Currently, the U.S. Census Bureau “Confidentiality Fact Sheet” states: Your responses to the 2020 Census are safe, secure, and protected by federal law. Your answers can only be used to produce statistics—they cannot be used against you in any way. By law, all responses to U.S. Census Bureau household and business surveys are kept completely […]

In the past twenty years, the rapid growth of data-intensive technologies such as smart devices and social media platforms has resulted in the collection and use of ever-expanding volumes and varieties of personal information.  Despite this fundamental reshaping of our relationship with technology, the legal framework for consent that underpins much of this data use […]

The goal of this article is to provide a framework for assessing issues of data portability and other required transfers of data. Greater portability and other required transfers of data can have pro-competitive effects – if more companies have access to commercially valuable data, then there can be less monopoly power and more innovation. On […]

In the past twenty years, the rapid growth of data-intensive technologies such as smart devices and social media platforms has resulted in the collection and use of ever-expanding volumes and varieties of personal information.  Despite this fundamental reshaping of our relationship with technology, the legal framework for consent that underpins much of this data use […]

The goal of this article is to provide a framework for assessing issues of data portability and other required transfers of data. Greater portability and other required transfers of data can have pro-competitive effects – if more companies have access to commercially valuable data, then there can be less monopoly power and more innovation. On […]

The doorbell rings, but no one is there. The temperature in the home goes from extremely cold to extremely hot without anyone touching the thermostat. Locks change when no one is home or unlock without warning in the middle of the night. The refrigerator is mysteriously turned off, leaving all the food inside to spoil. […]

As governments and private companies alike increasingly invest in surveillance tools such as facial recognition technology (FRT), the specter of a much more pervasive surveillance state looms. Clearview AI—a startup that scrapes publicly available photos on the Internet and sells a facial recognition search engine to law enforcement—has in turn faced numerous lawsuits alleging violations […]

The United States Census Bureau estimates that over nine million American households are currently behind on their rent. That is just one signal that when the United States overcomes the COVID-19 crisis, it will have to deal with the eviction crisis that has been simmering for over a decade and has now boiled over due […]

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is an emerging and evolving area of technology, encompassing a variety of decentralized activities related to finance and financial services. This Technology Explainer provides an overview of DeFi, its underlying technology, a side-by-side comparison between DeFi and traditional finance and banking, and a brief overview of the challenges facing DeFi.

The Internet has become an indispensable part of people’s lives in the 21st century. People generate a staggering amount of data across major social media platforms, which is visualized in figure 1. Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter allow billions of users to share their content freely. Not surprisingly, moderating the content and removing unwanted […]

Over the past two decades, cloud computing has transformed the technological landscape by increasing accessibility to and reducing the expense of online services. The technological underpinnings of the cloud begin with the Internet and its antecedents. Today, cloud computing affords the world distributed access to virtual assets, applications, and resources from anywhere in the world. […]

In less than a decade, ransomware has evolved from a niche form of cybercrime to a dominant attack vector that threatens governments, businesses, and individuals alike. Stories of attacks in the last few years demonstrate the crippling effects wrought by ransomware: hospitals without access to digital medical records, school districts unable to conduct distance learning, […]

In 2020, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (COVID-19) outbreak was declared a global pandemic, requiring unprecedented government intervention to contain the spread of this highly-contagious and sometimes deadly virus. One of the primary methods for containment of COVID-19 was contact tracing, whose success depends upon aggressive deployment. This technology explainer will analyze the […]

Technology has pervasively altered how people consume goods and services, creating niches for novel market actors. The entertainment and music industries have not been immune from these ongoing, dramatic changes. From the proliferation of electronic music genres like dubstep to the rapid growth of interactive virtual concerts during the COVID-19 pandemic, technology continues to rapidly […]

This Technology Explainer covers pluggable transports, an obfuscation tool that disguises a user’s network traffic to avoid certain traffic analysis and detection methods. Pluggable transports are like plugins—the term refers to their ability to “plug in” and swap out, which affords developers and users the chance to try different circumvention strategies in the same app […]