Bryce Clayton Newell

Augmented reality: hard problems of law and policy

Augmented reality (AR) technologies are poised to enter the commercial mainstream. Using an interdisciplinary research team, we describe our vision of AR and explore the unique and difficult problems AR presents for law and policy---including around privacy, free speech, discrimination, and safety.

Technopolicing, Surveillance, and Citizen Oversight: A Neorepublican Theory of Liberty and Information Control

In modern society, we see the struggle to balance the proper functioning of government with the interests and rights of the people to access government information playing out all around us. This paper explores the relationship between liberty and security implicated by government surveillance and citizen-initiated efforts to cast the gaze back at the government (so-called “reciprocal surveillance”). In particular, this paper explores how a neorepublican conception of political liberty, defined as the absence of the possibility of domination, can inform future information policy research in this area. The paper concludes that, to be fully non-dominating, government must respect and provide effective institutional and legal mechanisms for their citizenry to effectuate self-government and command noninterference. Establishing liberal access rights to information about government conduct and mechanisms that ensure that citizens can effectively command noninterference are justified on the grounds that they reduce the possibility of arbitrary, and actual, interference with the right of the people govern themselves.

Privacy in the Family

While the balance between individual privacy and government monitoring or corporate surveillance has been a frequent topic across numerous disciplines, the issue of privacy within the family has been largely ignored in recent privacy debates. Yet privacy intrusions between parents and children or between adult partners or spouses can be just as profound as those found in the more “public spheres” of life. Popular access to increasingly sophisticated forms of electronic surveillance technologies has altered the dynamics of family relationships. Monitoring, mediated and facilitated by practices of both covert and overt electronic surveillance, has changed the nature of privacy within the family. Parents are tracking children via GPS-enabled cell phone tracking software and are monitoring the Internet use of family members. Parents, siblings, and children are also posting information about their family members online, often without consent, and are creating social media profiles for others online. Prior scholarly work in philosophy and law has primarily addressed the privacy of children from third parties, usually commercial entities, and in the context of making medical decisions. Less attention has been directed at exploring a more general right of privacy of one family member against parents, siblings, children, or spouses. In this article, we do just that. We consider several moral rules that determine appropriate privacy boundaries within the family. More specifically, we will consider when overt or covert surveillance of a child, spouse, or partner by an adult family member is morally permitted.

The Panoptic Librarian: The Role of Video Surveillance in the Modern Public Library

Libraries have long maintained strong protections for patron privacy and intellectual freedom. However, the increasing prevalence of sophisticated surveillance systems in public libraries potentially threatens these core library commitments. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative case study examining why four libraries in the US and the UK installed video surveillance and how they manage these systems to balance safety and privacy. We examine the experience of these libraries, including one that later reversed course and completely removed all of its previously installed systems. We find that the libraries who install surveillance initially do so as either a response to specific incidents of crime or as part of the design of new buildings. Libraries maintain varying policies about whether video footage is protected as part of patron records, about dealing with law enforcement requests for footage, and whether patrons ought to maintain any expectation of privacy while inside libraries.

Video Surveillance in Public Libraries: A Case of Unintended Consequences?

This paper presents the findings of an exploratory qualitative research study in which the authors sought to examine why two public libraries have implemented video security systems and why one of these libraries has reversed course and recently removed a previously installed surveillance system. We found that one library initially installed the system in various branches as an ad hoc response to specific incidents of crime without central administrative oversight, while the other installed their system as an integral part of the design and construction of their central library location and collaborates with local police and professional consultants on security issues. The former library system subsequently removed all of their cameras in 2011 as a consequence of having negative interactions with local police departments.

Me, My Metadata, and the NSA: Privacy and Government Metadata Surveillance Programs

After Edward Snowden leaked classified intelligence records to the press in June 2013, government metadata surveillance programs – and the risk that large-scale metadata collection poses to personal information privacy – has taken center stage in domestic and international debates about privacy and the appropriate role of government. In this paper, the authors approach these questions by drawing upon theory and literature in both law and archival studies. This paper concludes that, because metadata surveillance can be highly intrusive to personal privacy – even more revealing in certain regards than the contents of our communications in some cases – and that certain types of metadata are inextricably linked with the records of our digitally mediated lives, legal distinctions that draw a line between communications “content” and metadata are inappropriate and insufficient to adequately protect personal privacy.

Context, visibility, and control: Police work and the contested objectivity of bystander video

This article examines how police officers understand and perceive the impact of bystander video on their work. Drawing from primarily qualitative data collected within two police departments in the Pacific Northwest, I describe how officers’ concerns about objectivity, documentation, and transparency all manifest as parts of a broader politics of information within policing that has been amplified in recent years by the affordances of new media platforms and increasingly affordable surveillance-enabling technologies. Officers’ primary concerns stem from their perceived inability to control the context of what is recorded, edited, and disseminated to broad audiences online through popular platforms such as YouTube.com, as well as the unwanted visibility (and accountability) that such online dissemination generates. I argue that understanding the effects of this `new visibility’ on policing, and the role played by new media in this process, has become vitally important to our tasks of organizing, understanding, and overseeing the police.

Introduction: conceptual directions for privacy in public space: Conceptual and Regulatory Challenges

Since its start, the twenty-first century has posed new challenges to privacy—challenges that have affected many areas of professional practice and are straining legal doctrines drafted in the previous century. At a conceptual level, the private space/public space dichotomy also increasingly fails to capture and describe privacy problems in a satisfying manner. This volume is aimed at addressing these challenges, by exploring and developing a research agenda on privacy in public space that crosses disciplinary boundaries. It includes contributions from primarily legal and philosophical scholars, but because the issues raised by privacy in public space extend well beyond disciplinary borders, it also features contributions that draw on geography and other social sciences. Each of these chapters contributes to the debate about what privacy in public is or can be from a different angle, by providing new arguments, concepts, ideas or insights. Bringing together law and philosophy seems particularly fitting for an exploration of this topic; while the legal contributions draw on actual real-world examples to lay bare the problems of privacy in public space, the philosophical contributions explore how we can better conceptualize privacy in public space by drawing on examples, normative argumentation and existing empirical research. The central theme of this introductory chapter is to explore conceptual paths for thinking about privacy in public. The authors in this volume have given various accounts of what privacy in public space is or can be, and discussed ethical, social and legal problems that arise when the private (information, activity, etc.) enters public space. Due to the proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICTs), more and more aspects of our private lives are spilling over into public space. We carry phones, laptops and other wearable computing devices— each of which potentially contains large amounts of personal (private) data—with us as we traverse a variety of public and private spaces each

Public places, private lives: Balancing of privacy and freedom of expression in the United Kingdom

The rights of privacy and expression often conflict. Case law from the United Kingdom suggests that the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law has spurred the growth of domestic privacy law at the expense of the rights of the press to free expression and, in line with prior theory, has also granted greater political authority to courts and judges tasked with balancing privacy and expression in domestic legal disputes. These shifts in privacy case law may also suggest that incorporation has increased opportunities for participatory democratic governance by the citizenry, at least through enhanced access to judicial remedies for privacy violations and the enforcement of Convention rights, as interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights.