YANA'S BLOG

On February 23, Sen. Padilla introduced SB 1298, which would require the Department of Highway Patrol to adopt “safety standards and performance requirements” with respect to cars that use “computers, sensors, and other technology and devices that enable [them] to safely operate without the active control and continuous monitoring of a human operator.” This is a carefully drafted piece of legislation that addresses some of the definitional issues raised by Ryan Calo and that I was concerned about with respect to similar legislation in Nevada last year. It is also exciting that California may be taking this step considering the vast amount of traffic accidents in this state that are caused by drunk-driving and other human errors. Driverless cars can also keep a smaller distance between cars—reducing traffic jams and pollution from car idling, which is of particular concern in California.

I wrote a post for the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology Digest outlining the California bill, but I would like to air one of my personal concerns here. As with the Nevada legislation, I am concerned that driverless cars can be used to gather personal information. The Ninth Circuit has already been struggling with the FBI’s desire to use technologies in cars to secretly gather information for law enforcement purposes. The Supreme Court also recently considered the use of GPS trackers in criminal investigations. However, cars operated entirely by computers have the potential of providing much more sensitive information. This information could get exposed not only to government surveillance, but also to data mining companies or hackers that could tap into the driverless systems to take control over the cars. The California bill should therefore explicitly require the Department of Highway Patrol to adopt standards with respect to privacy and security, in addition to “safety standards and performance requirements.”

Photo by jurvetson.

I wrote a blog post for the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology Digest about Falana v. Kent State Univ. which clarifies the level of contribution required to be listed as a co-inventor on a patent for a chemical compound.

Read about it here.

Photo by Milosz1.

In a judgment technically in favor of Hi-Media, the French company was sanctioned €25,000 (approx. $35,000) for deleting a reference to its competitor, Rentabiliweb, from a French Wikipedia article on “micropayment.” On July 1, the Commercial Court of Paris found that Rentabiliweb had engaged in unfair competition with respect to Hi-Media (unrelated to the Wikipedia revision) and awarded Hi-Media €100,000 (approx. $150,000) in damages, which were offset by the sanctions for its Wikipedia revision.

Though the Wikipedia reference to Rentabiliweb was removed anonymously, the revision history exposed an IP address that was traced to a computer at Hi-Media’s offices. The Court rejected Hi-Media’s argument that the removal could not be traced to a Hi-Media agent and found that the fact that the computer was installed on Hi-Media’s premises was clear proof that a person acting under Hi-Media’s authority was responsible for the removal. The removal, the Court found, caused obvious harm to Rentabiliweb.

The Court stopped short of awarding Rentabiliweb the full €150,000 that it claimed for the Wikipedia revision, ironically stating that “Wikipedia does not appear to be a site where an Internet user will habitually search for suppliers of services.” However, the user-edited online encyclopedia—currently ranked number 7 on Alexa rankings—presents an objective source of information and, at least, everyone I know consult it for most everything including market research.

The Court’s judgment is surprising mainly because Wikipedia is equipped with its own enforcement mechanism to ensure neutrality. The fundamental principle of Wikipedia is that each entry must be written from a Neutral Point of View (NPOV). It is intended to represent fairly, proportionately, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources. Over the years, Wikipedia has built up a bureaucracy to enforce this principle and users largely stay away from lawsuits. Given that judges’ assessment of this site may be somewhat outdated, it is best left to self-government.

Picture by throwthedamnthing.

On June 17, the State of Nevada introduced legislation (AB 511) that allows operation of autonomous vehicles on its highways, provided they comply specific regulations. The regulations, testing, and a driver’s license endorsement remain to be developed by the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles. Autonomous vehicles are expected to save thousands of lives lost in traffic accidents each year. The vehicles are developed to have 360-degrees perception, stay focused on the road, and react faster to road conditions than humans. Drunk driving, for example, will no longer be an issue. They may also reduce traffic jams by allowing cars to safely keep a smaller distance, which should mitigate pollution from car idling. While the legal recognition of this technology in Nevada is great progress, the legislation was rushed and failed to consider government surveillance enabled by autonomous vehicles.

AB 511 defines an “autonomous vehicle” to mean “a motor vehicle that uses artificial intelligence, sensors and global positioning system coordinates to drive itself without the active intervention of a human operator.” It defines “artificial intelligence” to mean “the use of computers and related equipment to enable a machine to duplicate or mimic the behavior of human beings.” This definition, as discussed in Ryan Calo’s blog, fails to acknowledge the fact that certain vehicles already include “artificial intelligence” to various degrees. This legislation may, for example, unintentionally require special testing of self-parking cars that are already available for public consumption and are not commonly considered to be “autonomous vehicles.”

The Legislation also lacks analysis regarding collection of data from vehicles operated by computers. There is a clear advantage for a company that ultimately will provide these cars (whether it is Google or not) to collect data from the cars to advance the performance of the technology. There should be some clear directions as to how a company is to handle that data. It may, for example, be kept in a manner that does not reflect personal information about where any particular vehicle has been or is going. More importantly, there needs to be restrictions on the government’s ability to access that data. This is significant given that the government already tried to use the current technology in certain cars to obtain information for “law enforcement purposes” in a rather non-transparent manner. Restrictions on government surveillance are usually developed by case law. But courts have been slow to develop principles to address computers and new technology. Therefore, it may be wise to address these issues with legislation based on thorough input from engineers and researchers that can provide insight into the potential of this technology.

Obviously, these issues take a long time to consider and they should not get in the way of the development and use of this technology. However, because autonomous vehicles were not previously expressly prohibited in Nevada, they could probably have been used even before this legislation (though there is some debate about whether the lack of prohibition means that autonomous cars are legal). It is, however, clear that the Nevada Legislature dropped all practical considerations into the DMV’s lap, which definitely lacks the technical expertise and resources to consider these issues (if the California DMV’s workload is any indication, early this year, DMV’s staff estimated the process of printing new driver’s licenses to average about 8 months per license!). Given that this technology will likely not be available within the next year, the Nevada Legislature could have taken some time, working with experts (perhaps Google?), to consider these issues.

Originally posted here.
Photo by jurvetson.

Over the last week there has been a lot of discussion about Facebook’s new face recognition feature now embedded in photo-tagging.  Facebook was first criticized for failing to warn its users about this feature as it became available globally. Yesterday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (“EPIC”) and several other organizations filed a complaint against Facebook with the US Federal Trade Commission alleging that the company’s service is “unfair and deceptive trade practices.” Commentators have pointedly noted that face recognition in photos taken in public places likely do not trigger any privacy concerns because the person has elected to show herself in the public place. But the face recognition technology may nevertheless violate privacy by using private photos to train the face recognition algorithms.

Reasonable Expectation of Privacy.

There is no global black-letter law when it comes to privacy.  Privacy laws differ by country and , in the U.S., often depend on the identity of a plaintiff or defendant. For example, a government defendant may have a higher responsibility to protect its citizens’ privacy, whereas a celebrity plaintiff often has a weaker privacy claim. At the core of most U.S. privacy laws, however, is the notion of reasonable expectation of privacy. When someone takes a photo of you in the street, you likely do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Conversely, if someone takes a photo of you through your apartment window, your privacy may be violated.

How Does Facebook Violate Privacy?

That your friends tag public photos of you likely does not violate your privacy. But if they are helped by an algorithm that has been trained on your private photos–e.g. photos that you have uploaded to Facebook subject to privacy settings limiting their availability to you only or certain friends–that triggers privacy concerns.  An analogous situation is if you hand in your computer for repair, with photos on your hard drive, and the technician shows your photos to a stalker who can then more easily recognize you when you are walking home from work. A vital difference is that Facebook does not show your photos to an individual, but to an algorithm. However, because the algorithm then performs the traditionally human task of recognizing people in photos, that distinction becomes blurred. Facebook’s algorithm could be used by someone who, with bad intentions, befriend you on Facebook just to privately upload innumerable photos and find out if you are featured in any of those photos. Given the privacy interests at stake, the law needs to recognize that Facebook holds photos in trust for its users, much like a computer repair service.

What’s Facebook to Do?

Facebook is offering a service and it is responding to criticism from users that tagging the same individuals in an album of 30 photos can be tedious. There are a number of things Facebook could do to be more appealing to individuals that are concerned about their privacy. First, Facebook should have been more transparent about the introduction of this function and allowed people to make a choice before their private photos were scanned for their facial features. It is not better to ask for forgiveness than permission.  Thus, the function should have been “disabled” by default.  Second, face recognition software is fine as long as it is trained on tags provided by the same Facebook user that the software to tag her photos. For instance, if you do not “enable” the feature, your Facebook friend may still use the software to recognize you in her photos, but the software will be trained only on photos she previously uploaded and tagged. That is similar to how the software is applied in Google’s Picasa and Apple’e iPhoto. Finally, Facebook should recognize that although it is a company and its users could go elsewhere, it has become an important global community with 500 million users and it would benefit from earning its users’ trust.

Originally posted here.
Photo by Robert Scoble.

While in other fields the Internet is mainly considered to provide solutions to everyday problems, lawyers far more frequently discuss legal problems created by the Internet.  This is only natural given that lawyers by profession seek out legal problems to ponder and solve.  One potential solution, however, that I think deserves recognition is the power of online education to avert international disputes in the long term.

The Potential of Global Education for International Conflict Resolution.

My persuasion that eduction is the solution to many international disputes stems from my experience of the International Baccalaureate program (IB).  While partly created to allow children of travelling diplomats to obtain globally acceptable qualifications for university admissions, the IB’s mission is to “develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.”  The international curriculum certainly offered my class a more nuanced view of the world than my national education had done up until that point.  We studied history through the accounts of historians from different countries, often from different sides of a conflict.  We read and analyzed world literature and studied and represented different countries in Model U.N.  Primarily, we came to understand that there are always many different sides to an issue and that an adequate solution to a problem needs to acknowledge them all.  As I later studied public international law, I was incredibly appreciative of this understanding.

Although admission to the IB program vary by country, the eduction is often reserved to a small clique.  My school required high grades and good performance on entrance exams in English and Math.  Elsewhere, the program is offered by private schools charging high tuition.  But more children would benefit from a global education and intercultural understanding that they could draw upon as adults, for example, when deciding which political leader to support in their home country.  Wouldn’t it be great then if global education of that sort could be available to everyone?  Now, thanks to the Internet, it may well be in the very short future.

Khan Academy, Skype in the Classroom, Teach the World Online, and Beyond.

The Internet has provided many new opportunities for higher education via iTunesU, P2PU, Academic Earth, Open Culture, to name a few.  However, while older or exceptionally gifted students can do a lot of self-learning, to teach younger students and achieve the intercultural understanding I discuss above on a wider scale, online education needs more structure.

One such more structured program is Khan Academy.  It provides over 2,100 educational video tutorials that students can watch in their own time, with the ability to stop and rewind when a student finds a concept challenging.  Students can then do exercises online, which are generated based on each particular student’s performance.  The answers are analyzed to provide an overview of each student’s progress.  The Khan Academy’s initial focus has been on improving science and math skills, but it does have potential to provide global social science education as well.

Skype in the Classroom is a global community for teachers to use Skype in their work to share their experience with classes across the world. Teachers can come up with a project or search among the 550+ projects that other teachers advertise.  It is an incredible resource  for teachers to offer different perspectives and cultures to their students.  However, it requires teachers to be open-minded to new teaching-styles and technologies.

Teach the World Online offers English classes via video conferencing to children in Haiti, Nepal, Colombia, and Cambodia.  Though its curriculum is currently limited to language classes, fluency in English will make it possible for these children to use all the other resources available online if they have access to the Internet.  Thus, this too has the potential to provide students with intercultural understanding.

New education projects are springing up.  Many are in form of start-ups.  Many more are to be expected, particularly with the recent launch of Imagine K12, an education start-up accelerator modelled on the highly successful start-up accelerator YCombinator.  Imagine K12 focuses on education in the U.S. However, given that many of their companies will offer technology and web-based solutions, if successful, they are bound to spill across geographical boundaries.

Wikipedia and Other Information Online.

Finally, if a student today has a question about the homework material, rather than waiting until the next day to ask the teacher, she is more likely to google it or consult Wikipedia.  As a result, the information she’ll obtain will likely contain the nuanced world view that comes from global participation online.  The editing process on Wikipedia ensures that its entries capture controversies and various views on issues.  This too could lead to more intercultural understanding over time.

Originally posted here.
Photo by D Sharon Pruitt.